Becoming a Mensch

Alan Morinis,  Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: One Man’s Journey  to Rediscover a Jewish Spiritual TraditionTrumpeter, 2002 Alan Morinis  offers an engaging account of how  he came to  re-order his life according to the Jewish practice of…

A Paradise for Perusers

I have given away four copies of James Mustich’s chef d’oeuvre, 1,000 Books to Read before You Die: A Life-Changing List, before I bought and kept one for myself. I became acquainted with Mr. Mustich…

People

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts…

Correspondents

Proximity by Martín Zaldivar Hi Mark, … The last two years have been rough. New York City can be a very lonely place, and I miss my good friends, as well as the calmness of…

A Phenomenologist of Impermanence

In this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief. –Marcel…

Dedication

Nathalie Vanderlinden takes a passion for Proust to a new, public level! Though Proust had a Jewish mother, he seems to me neither Christian nor Jewish. His wisdom is his own, and though it has…

“If Not You, Who?”

Having recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, I thought of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, volume 7 in his In Search of Lost Time. 1. As for the inner book of unknown symbols……

Hold It All

In [Proust’s] work we come across an absolute absence of bias, a willingness to know and to understand as many opposing states of the human soul as possible, a capacity for discovering in the lowest…

This Pilgrimage of the Heart

I first read the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time spring through autumn of 1997.  A couple of years later, I read the collection of Proust’s essays in On Art &…