This Week
What I’m Reading This Week Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian Aharon Shabtai, War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems Nathan A. Scott, Mirrors of Man…
Category: Reading
A Page of Mev’s Notes on Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”
Patricia Geier and I are reading and discussing Nathan A. Scott’s book, Mirrors of Man in Existentialism. This morning after having read the chapter on Buber, I went to my shelves and pulled off I…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/5
7. Our monkey-minds are like these agitated monsters that are wanting this and collecting that, always grabbing, grabbing, grabbing. The process of cooling out that agitation takes time, and that’s hard for the agitated mind…
Reading of Dorothy’s Reading
The Dorothy Day Book, compiled by Margaret Quigley and Michael Garvey, is a kind of posthumous commonplace book, that is, a collection of quotations from Dorothy’s decades of reading (largely from her column in the…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine /2
40. The principal truth is this: latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply. The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in…
“What Am I Living My Life for?” Ivan Ilyich and Ikigai- A Summer 2018 Reading/Writing Class
“I see that all of my work amounts to nothing, that my ten volumes aren’t worth anything!” —Guy de Maupassant, after reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich David Barsamian: You had something in mind in…
“What Am I Living My Life for?” Ivan Ilyich and Ikigai- A Summer 2018 Reading/Writing Class
“I see that all of my work amounts to nothing, that my ten volumes aren’t worth anything!” —Guy de Maupassant, after reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich David Barsamian: You had something in mind in…
That Glow, That Yes!
Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft 30 September 2000 It’s clear to me today, anyway, that my Holy Contour of Life book will be a structure like Natalie’s: short, compressed, easy…
“Why Must the Poet’s Mouth Be Bloodied, His Teeth Caved in?”
More than a decade ago, octogenarian Jesuit felon Daniel Berrigan spoke at the local Jesuit university (in the auditorium of the business school, no less). During the Q & A, a friend of mine asked…
Short, Savory, and Sound: Aitken’s Miniatures
In fall 2000 I first encountered Robert Aitken Roshi with his book, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps, a collection of scores of four-line poems, or gathas. Nine years later, I read his Miniatures of a…