Today’s One-Liner (#37)
One advantage of knowing the classics is that no matter the what situation you might find yourself in, you’ll remember that someone else was there before you. –Kenneth Rexroth, quoted in Anne Waldman and Laura…
Category: Classics
Reading Jewish
In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists. He got me back to Shakespeare and sparked…
Not Flustered, Not Melancholy, Not Anxious
James Laughlin, Ezra Pound’s publisher, observed that “Pound’s translations of Confucian texts, beautiful as is their language, are seldom applauded by Sinologues.” But we common readers may appreciate such versions from the Analects, when they…
Taking Refuge in Po Chü-i
Enough already of Useful Idiots, Counterpunch, flare-ups at The Intercept Political yammering by self-appointed soothsayers This Friday night I fade far away from news of assorted American Psychos And am welcomed by Po Chü-i Who…
Gratitude/555
I give thanks for translators whose labors allow me to meditate on the teachings of sages throughout time, like David Hinton’s work with Confucius’s Analects… 1.16 The Master said: “Don’t grieve when people fail…
Trying To Be One-Pointed
In the autumn, on retreat at a mountain temple Although I try to hold the single thought of Buddha’s teaching in my heart, I cannot help but hear the many crickets’ voices calling as well….
Trying To Be One-Pointed
In the autumn, on retreat at a mountain temple Although I try to hold the single thought of Buddha’s teaching in my heart, I cannot help but hear the many crickets’ voices calling as well….
Arise with a Brave Heart: Six Translations of the Gita, 2:3
It does not become you to yield to this weakness. Arise with a brave heart and destroy the enemy. —trans. Eknath Easwaran Don’t yield to impotence! It is unnatural in you! Banish this petty weakness…
“If Not You, Who?”
Having recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, I thought of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, volume 7 in his In Search of Lost Time. 1. As for the inner book of unknown symbols……
Finding One’s Lost Mind
Julia Ching, The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming University of South Carolina Press, 1972 I previously studied with delight Julia Ching’s To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming. Wang was the towering philosophical figure…