With Gratitude for Harold Bloom

In 1994 I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon after I had taken a leave of absence from my doctoral program in Religion and Society at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.   Bloom  offered…

Yoga Sutras Exchanges with Yael

Concentration, meditation, and pure contemplation focused on a single object constitute perfect discipline. 3.4—Barbara Stoler Miller, translation of Yoga Sutras Notes/Connections 1.Ekāgratā, noun, Sanskrit.  One-pointedness, doing only one thing at a time, concentrating upon a…

Readers

Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study.  I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.  A…

Her Vivacity Gladdened Life

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Knopf: Everyman’s Library,  1992  I’ve acknowledged previously the importance of Reinaldo Arenas and Eduardo Galeano  during the late 1990s into 2000 as I was trying to figure out…

The Struggle Is One

In the 1970s Orbis Books was the U.S. cutting-edge publisher of books coming out of Latin America that heralded the phenomenon of liberation theology.   Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Jon Sobrino were among the…

A More Lively Mode

I read James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson in the summer of 1999. At the time I was gathering materials for what eventually became The Book of Mev.  The following passage from Boswell left its…

Take the Long View

I once wrote for a magazine:  I made a calculation, that if I should write but a page a day, at the same rate, I should, in ten years, write nine volumes in folio, of…

On Hope and Expectation

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords:  but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly…