Dear Anya
Thank you for your cool list of queries which I saw after I got back from vacation at Blue-Eye, Missouri! I will start with an easy one: “Favorite Book”— The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoevskyas translated by…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Bodhisattva/Neurotic
Allen wanted to see everything, do everything, and meet everyone. 267 Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg Recently, I have read biographies of Goethe and Proust. Today I finished…
Scoffers and Seers
“They all laughed at him. Particularly a lieutenant-colonel….’I am a lieutenant-colonel,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never met any God in all my life. Where is He, your Christ? Has anyone ever seen Him?’ ‘I have,’…
He Won’t Be Swayed
“And so I am practically compelled to follow that path, and I shall keep to it in spite of all the world. It is useless for you to wear yourselves out trying to persuade me…
Get to Work
Work on reducing your likes and dislikes, not only in personal relationships but in everything….Try this with jobs and responsibilities: the nagging little things you have to do but just don’t want to. It’s…
“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”
“Music can madden and it can help heal the broken mind. If it can be the ‘food of love,’ it can also trigger the feasts of hatred.” –George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life, 81.
Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will
Actually, even if it were possible, Rachel Ertel would not have tried to revive Eastern European culture. She wants only to preserve its memory and apply some of the political insights associated with the tradition…
Mirrors
CLEANSE THE MIRROR OF YOUR HEART AND YOU WILL SEE GOD. –Neem Karoli Baba, in Ram Dass, Miracle of Love, 249 The heart-mind of the ordinary person is like a dirty and stained mirror. One…
Getting Free
We are caught in the prison of the mind. If we are to escape we must recognize that we are in prison. If we think we are free, then no escape is possible.—George Gurdjieff, quoted…
Writing Matters
This much the outsider can make out. He looks at the harrowing of Pushkin, at Gogol’s despair, at Dostoevsky’s term in Siberia, at Tolstoy’s volcanic struggle against censorship, or at the long catalogue of the…