A Feat of Reading and Writing
1. [T]he sheer enormity of what took place between 1933 and 1945 beggars our powers of description and understanding. The more one studies this period and its excesses, the more one must conclude that for…
Category: Reading
Slow Reading
A young friend decided to read Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine (Her family are refugees from there) Most chapters are a page maybe two She is reading two chapters a day H. D. Thoreau said:…
Our Bliss with Books: A Fall Writing and Reading Course
I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable…
The Most Precious Treasure
Meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran distinguished between two kinds of spiritual reading: instruction and inspiration. While he believes it makes sense to limit your instructions to one teacher/lineage/path, you can fruitfully read from all religious traditions…
“I’ll Never Know, in the Silence You Don’t Know, You Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”
Working on a kind of sequel to Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, I am imagining a character named Bella Levenshteyn, who in her twenties devotes herself to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors. At…
For the Love of a Few Golden Sentences
What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us? … The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources…….
For the Love of a Few Golden Sentences
What is genius but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us? … The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources…….
What I Can Use: Notes on Waldman and Birman’s Civil Disobediences
“Emerson was not a systematic reader, but he had a genius for skimming and a comprehensive system for taking notes…. He read rapidly, looking for what he could use.” p. 67 “He read widely in…
Commonplace Books
From the Be in Love with Yr Life class, Annie Kratzmeyer was telling me about the commonplace notebooks she fills. Here’s a page of one of mine. What Emerson kept, and what he recommended enthusiastically…
Those Blasts of a Trumpet
I’ve recently finished reading Robert Richardson’s engrossing biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire. The author regularly highlights the exuberant reading Emerson did throughout his life. Robertson not only identifies authors and titles of what Emerson…