Category: Literature

Buddhism, Literature, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Why Won’t You Be My Teacher?

Fernando Kaskais

An ex-monk and an aspiring practitioner discuss writing and Zen over wine and homemade schnapps. By Shozan Jack Haubner Two years ago Karl messaged me on Twitter. He had read my books. He too lived in Vienna. He wanted to buy me a beer at a famous socialist pub. He seemed odd and grumpy, like I owed him money, even though we’d never met. I’ve since discovered that saying someone is odd and grumpy is just another way of saying they’re Austrian. We’ve become good friends. I recently learned that his daughter was born on his living room rug. Not by choice. … Continue reading Why Won’t You Be My Teacher?

Literature, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

How to Be with Each Other’s Suffering: Elie Wiesel on the Antidote to Our Paralysis in the Face of World-Overwhelm

Fernando Kaskais

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) “I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.” BY MARIA POPOVA There is a phenomenon in forests known as inosculation — the fusing together of separate trees into a single organism after their branches or roots have been entwined for a long time. Sometimes, one of the former individuals may be cut or broken at … Continue reading How to Be with Each Other’s Suffering: Elie Wiesel on the Antidote to Our Paralysis in the Face of World-Overwhelm

Japan, Literature, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits

Fernando Kaskais

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my tsundoku. KEY TAKEAWAYS By Kevin Dickinson I love books. If I go to the bookstore to check a price, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that it’s for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page. The problem is that my book-buying habit outpaces my ability to read them. … Continue reading The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits

History, Literature, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Seize the day? Here’s what people get wrong about “carpe diem”

Fernando Kaskais

Credit: Mikhail Leonov / Adobe Stock “Carpe diem” was only one part of Horace’s poem Odes 1.11. KEY TAKEAWAYS In his book This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive, philosopher Nick Riggle explores the common phrases people say to inspire themselves or others to live good lives. One of the most common — and perhaps misunderstood — pieces of advice comes from ancient Rome: “carpe diem.” In this excerpt of the book, Riggle takes a closer look at what Horace likely meant in his poem Odes 1.11. by Nick Riggle You are familiar with the Ancient Roman advice, carpe diem, … Continue reading Seize the day? Here’s what people get wrong about “carpe diem”

Literature, Media&Culture, PhilosophyLeave a comment

Was Colin Wilson a fascist?

Fernando Kaskais

Colin Wilson on Hampstead Heath in 1956. Photo by Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock For thousands of fans, he made philosophy thrillingly relevant. Yet there is a deep unsavoury undercurrent to his worldview Jules Evans is an honorary research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. He is co-editor, with Tim Read, of the book Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency (2020). Which would you prefer: low to middling success your entire writing career, or a sudden rise to global fame, followed by an equally steep descent, then the rest of your … Continue reading Was Colin Wilson a fascist?

Art, History, Literature, Media&CultureLeave a comment

How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers

Fernando Kaskais

Sor Juana “A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.” BY MARIA POPOVA All societies are both the creators of their myths and are created by them. All artists are the makers and remakers of our myths of meaning — myths we co-create whenever we engage with art. The best of them transmigrate across societies and epochs, naming what is difficult to name and difficult to bear, touching other lives — often lives wildly different from the artist’s — with that luminous longing for elemental truth that is the creative impulse in its purest form, the fundament of … Continue reading How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers

History, Literature, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Repentance, Repair, and What True Forgiveness Takes: Lessons from Maimonides for the Modern World

Fernando Kaskais

One of Aubrey Beardsley’s radical 1893 illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. (Available as a print.) “Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so.” BY MARIA POPOVA “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in his reckoning with the depths of life. “Forgiving,” Hannah Arendt offered a generation earlier in her splendid antidote to the irreversibility of … Continue reading Repentance, Repair, and What True Forgiveness Takes: Lessons from Maimonides for the Modern World

Art, Literature, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach

Fernando Kaskais

“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.” BY MARIA POPOVA “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in,” Rachel Carson wrote as she contemplated the loneliness of creative work after her unexampled books about the sea made her one of the most beloved writers of her time, “you will interest other people.” She couldn’t have known it then, but across the Atlantic another visionary was drawing creative succor from her … Continue reading M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach

Literature, Philosophy, Politics, RussiaLeave a comment

Leo Tolstoy on the Obsolescence of the State as a Form of Government and the Antidote to Violence

Fernando Kaskais

“Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it.” BY MARIA POPOVA “To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears,” Octavia Butler wrote in her searing admonition about choosing our leaders. “To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.” But in some deep animal sense, to be led at all is to risk handing one’s own moral conscience over to another. … Continue reading Leo Tolstoy on the Obsolescence of the State as a Form of Government and the Antidote to Violence

Literature, Media&Culture, Philosophy, Psychology, RussiaLeave a comment

Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning

Fernando Kaskais

“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” BY MARIA POPOVA “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” asks the poetic physicist and scientific novelist Alan Lightman on the pages of his exquisite inquiry into the nature of existence. We can’t, of course — but out of those creaturely limits, out of our longing to transcend them, arises our eternal hunger for meaning, arises everything we might call art. Nick Cave intuited this in his lovely meditation on music, feeling, and transcendence in the … Continue reading Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning