“[The novel] is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to ‘feel with’ others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative … [...]
Friday, December 22, 2006
From Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, in which fifty-two year old Clarissa contemplates a moment from when she was eighteen:
“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation [...]
Sunday, December 17, 2006
I have been haunted for some time now by the notion that I am somehow less human for not finding the time or inclination to write fiction, learn an instrument, or create something that was not there before, preferably in a manner which exerts a profound influence on the rest of humanity. If I [...]
Thursday, December 14, 2006
I include in full the James Irby translation of Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, slightly oblivious to the copyright issues I may be infringing upon. This staggering work of prose is so much more than a philosophical parlor game, it is an allegory of the human condition as evocative as life itself. [...]
Friday, September 8, 2006
I have to thank Perc’s resiliency for bullying me into reading Borges for my own good. I have just finished reading his short story collection, ‘The Aleph’, and while not every story resonated with me, the majority did. My prior knowledge of Borges was nil so I came in fresh and read the [...]
Opening paragraphs of ‘book of disquiet’:
“I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of [...]
Thursday, December 8, 2005
I am going to share some highlights from the book, with the hopes of coming back to this at another time to expand into a commentary post.
“A necessary evil cannot really be an evil at all, since it is a characteristic of evil that it is not necessary but gratuitous” (p. 17)
“In a war on [...]
The following is an extract from Philosophy Online [The comments included at the bottom of the passage attempt to correct the author’s grammatical errors]
“In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein uses an analogy in an attempt to clarify some of the problems involved in thinking of the mind as something over and above behaviour. Imagine, he says, [...]
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Further elucidation of my steadfast belief in the inherent value of tacit knowledge, from the nineteenth century scribe William Hazlitt:
“It is, I confess, strange to me that men who pretend to more than usual accuracy in distinguishing and analyzing, should insist that in treating of human nature, of moral good and evil, the nominal differences [...]
Wittgenstein renouncing the logical positivism that inspired his early career in philosophy:
“(107). The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our
requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in [...]
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