Portrait of the Artist as a Kid

 In his new school James excelled at lessons and won prizes for the best English compositions. The money helped to buy clothes and food for the needy family and even allowed for little trips to…

Today’s One-Liner (#187)

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce, A Portrait of…

Then Things Changed

“I was prepared actually never to be translated, never to be known, to remain a Yiddish writer.” –Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, 88

Triumph

If you completely conquer yourself, you will more easily subdue all other things. The perfect victory is to triumph over self. For he who holds himself in such subjection that sensuality obeys reason and reason…

Today’s One-Liner (#185)

We had many mutual friends while he was studying at Harvard and I was working in Boston, but I think our first face-to-face meeting was in jail in Brookline, Massachusetts, after we had both been…

Self-un-awareness

[I]f you believe the scapegoat is guilty, you are not going to name it as being “my scapegoat.” If France scapegoats Dreyfus, no one will recognize that Dreyfus is a scapegoat.  –René Girard, in Cynthia…

Today’s One-Liner (#184)

Among traditional religion’s strongest resources are  precisely its ability to create and validate occasions for silence, contemplation, emptiness in the sense of cessation from activity and worldly meaning. –James Hitchcock, The Decline and Fall of…

This, But Not That

We’ve all seen self-deception of this kind on display in the reaction of Catholic educators to last Friday’s address by Pope Benedict. Having effectively divorced themselves from the Church with the 1967 Land O’ Lakes…

Today’s One-Liner (#183)

In retrospect it is easy to see what was not perceived at the time — that no conservative body with an ancient and sacred system of symbols can alter these significantly without a severe spiritual…