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…
Category: World Literature
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…
Today’s One-Liner (#30)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. –Joan Didion, The White Album
Today’s One-Liner (#23)
Commonplace miracle: that so many commonplace miracles happen. –Wislawa Szymborska, “Miracle Fair”
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
Show Up Already
Even if you lack all faith, simply to seat yourself before an image, hold a rosary and take up a sutra book is to perform a virtuous act, however perfunctory, even seated on your meditation…
Today’s One-Liner (#18)
I remember when I lived in Boston reading all of Dostoyevsky’s novels one right after the other. –Joe Brainard, I Remember