Fading, Vanishing

All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown.  This “outgrowing” proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness.  Some higher…

This Is It!

Dogen said we must penetrate this moment, again and again, forever. This is the most important thing we can do. There is nothing to change, nothing to hold on to, nothing to get caught by….

Carry on, Regardless

A man accustomed to vicissitudes is not easily dejected. —Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia Men seldom give pleasure, where they are not pleased themselves; it is necessary, therefore, to cultivate an habitual…

What Can You Say about Sei?

[She was] a complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant…

Reminders

Whereas, Sir, you know courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.—Samuel Johnson, in  James Boswell, The Life of Samuel…

On “Useful Idiots”

The last half of 2023 I have shared several posts based on the riveting book by Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty. Recently, I noticed he and his colleague Morton Schapiro used their knowledge on…

Yammering

When people get together they are never silent for a moment. They will always talk. When you listen to what they say, a great deal of it is pointless. There is much harm and little…

Dostoevsky Saw It Coming

What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-­century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…

Finding and Loving Islam

I teach a course called Comparative Religion and Culture at Maryville University, and this past semester I was fortunate to be with Ajla Masinovic on Tuesdays and Thursdays. An engaged and insightful learner in each…

Focus

Depend on it, Sir, when a man knows  he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. —Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson There is no temper more unpropitious…