The Canon in the Canon
Of all the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount was the portion that impressed me most, and I studied it more often than any other part. Nowhere else does Christ speak with such solemnity; nowhere…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Instruction for Whenever Watching or Listening to the Day’s News
Half-smile when irritated: When you realise you are irritated, half-smile at once. Inhale and exhale quietly, maintaining the half-smile for three breaths. –Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Being Awake
Drop Pop Culture, Some Say
Miles Davis–why bother with any of it–Jazz, modern musicians, dope addicts, punks–Monk, crooks, killers, Bud Powell, Dizzy’s razor and Dizzy’s scorn & Al Sublette’s scorn–no. Give me the Bodhi men. Don’t even play the radio…
Biden and Putin Would Despise Tolstoy
To destroy governmental violence only one thing is needed: it is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism which alone supports that instrument of violence is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling,…
The Rule Is Still Golden
Armies will only be diminished and abolished when people cease to trust governments, and themselves seek salvation from the miseries that oppress them, and seek that safety, not by the complicated and delicate combinations of…
What Simone Weil Wrote about School Studies
… the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. … All tasks that really call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reason…
To Cancel or Not to Cancel?
[A TV reporter] wanted to know how I came to terms with a Jew-hater like Richard Wagner. I replied spontaneously: ‘There were, and there are, many fine people on earth, but none of them has…
One Reader May Suffice
Any author, [Marcel] Proust wrote Jaloux, should be happy to “write for a single, exquisite reader like you,” and he added a Proustian analogy comparing Jaloux’s contact with his book to pollen intended for “a…
Up to Me (and Us)
There is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west….
Forthwith!
All we can know is, what we, who compose humanity, must do, and what not, in order that the kingdom of God may come. That we all know. And every one need but begin to…