Category: World Literature

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…

Writing and Reading Inter-Are/2

Johnson made such chains of learned reference in his writing, and his written works are the outgrowth of the kind of reading Johnson did, in which fragments of writing can be distributed under preexisting topics…

Isn’t This the Truth?

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, a book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.  —Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by…

Know Your Purpose

By refusing to distract himself from the main task, by jealously guarding his energies for what really mattered, [Arthur] Waley was able to produce his vast corpus of work. Title is a key theme in…

From Antigone to Thich Nhat Hanh

Teach us to care and not to care…T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday Over the years when reading Sophocles’ Antigone, I tended to see her as the conscientious heroine, standing alone against her uncle Creon, the brutal…

One to One

Emerson never wrote for groups or classes or institutions; his intended audience was always the single hearer or reader. –Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, xii

Writing and Reading Inter-Are/1

When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly.  The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library…

Today’s One-Liner (#20)

Consider, Sir, how insignificant this will appear a twelve-month hence. –Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell,  The Life of Samuel Johnson