Start Where We Are
Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why can’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…
Category: World Literature
Today’s One-Liner (#15)
The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles. –Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir
Invitations and Incitements
I think it’s best to see Walt, and virtually every other imaginative writer of consequence, as issuing not edicts but invitations. Walt asks us to make his words ours, his vision our own….you can respond…
Advice to a Young Person on Keeping a Journal
Let her review her journal often, and set down what she finds herself to have omitted, that she may trust to memory as little as possible, for memory is soon confused by a quick succession…
Today’s One-Liner (#12)
It’s terribly depressing to discover some quite worthless person blithely reciting a poem that you yourself had particularly liked and carefully copied down in a notebook. –Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney
Containing Multitudes
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 53 [Soen Nakagawa] had many faces: he was a simple monk, a “crazy wisdom” Zen master,…
Honesty & Humility
There is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn’t understand, he rewrote. –David Hinton on Po Chü-i, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese…
Today’s One-Liner (#10)
On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils. –La Rochefoucauld, Maxim #110 One gives nothing so liberally as pieces of advice. –Translation by Stuart D. Warner and Stéphane DouardSt. Augustine’s Press, 2001
All Our Relations
All women are mothers and sisters, and all men are fathers and brothers in God’s family.–Maharajji, in Ram Dass, Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba Oh humanityI am your grateful son.Every man my…
Searching
It was in Kafka that Scholem discovered a kind of heretical, secular Kabbalah, a literature paradoxically at once canonical and nihilistic. With Max Brod and Walter Benjamin, Scholem saw in Kafka a deeply Jewish writer,…