Soul-Power

A healthy ego is transformed into a soul only via the burden of another who must impinge on the ego, causing the ego to shrink, as it were. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The…

Today’s One-Liner (#65)

I  want to defend my culture, not theirs, and I inform you that I like Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare and  Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam. –Oriana Fallaci,…

“What Dreams May Come”

These passages, with their rich imagery and their unerring rhythmic ebb and flow, are among the most moving and complex speeches in our literature. But it is the soliloquy in the third act, “To be…

Look Within

In a sense, everything Proust wrote was a rehearsal for the Search, but the important point—made clear by his many anguished doubts about whether or not he was a novelist—is that until he found the…

Recent Reading

The job of an intellectual is to listen to the history that is being made all around you and to respond in new ways by re-assessing your previous beliefs. This is what the founding generation…