Category: Wisdom Traditions

Sages of the One-Liners

Guy Davenport, Herakleitos and Diogenes Grey Fox Press, 1981 Scholar and translator  Davenport  retrieves from the ancient Greek world  two thinkers who have the knack for concision.  The following  is a small culling that may…

“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……

A Monument Made of Words

Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court June 1998 After we had left Warsaw (during the First World War), we continued to hear news of him from time to time.  One son died, a daughter…

Hasidism

You can take everything from me—the pillow from under my head, my house—but you cannot take God away from my heart. — Nahman of Bratslav Everything the true Hasid does or does not do mirrors…

Hold It All

In [Proust’s] work we come across an absolute absence of bias, a willingness to know and to understand as many opposing states of the human soul as possible, a capacity for discovering in the lowest…

The Irresistible Power of Natural Powers

Having recently perused Jim Forest’s biography and memoir of Dan Berrigan (Playing in the Lions’ Den), I returned to Berrigan’s collection of poems, And the Risen Bread. If I can find five poems in such…

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…

Concentration Is Consecration

Sri Eknath Easwaran distinguishes two kinds of spiritual reading: that of instruction and that of inspiration.  Simone Weil’s book, Waiting for God, is an example of the latter, as  it is fecund with material for…