Clik here to view.
To burn delight from suffering
When someday this long affliction will have broken up, like ice, it will be spoken of as of the Black Death; and children on the heath will build a man of straw to burn delight from suffering and light...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Acts of Unlearning
The pathways of thought we will sketch have need of poetry, which in its nakedness and directness invades analytical language and allows it to open up; Arendt rejects instruments of comprehension that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Epic of Words
Time and again in my afternoons on the plateau, I applauded the epic of words. And I laughed as well, not the laughter of ridicule, but the laughter of recognition and complicity. Yes, there is a word...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Quiet Revolution Triptych
For a long time I was genuinely puzzled as to how so many suburban American teenagers could be entranced, for instance, by Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life — a book, after all, written...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Resisting Translation
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Duality of Silence
In The World of Silence, Max Picard quotes Goutran de Procius’s Kablina, where he sums up so lucidly the duality of silence, that tension between rapture and fear familiar to anyone that chooses to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Year in Reading: 2014
A sense of despondency settled on me as I totted up the number of books I completed this year. Sixty-four read to date in 2014, a hefty reduction from the eighty-five to a hundred I used to consider my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Companions Does the Wind Have?
A sample below of Hans Henny Jahnn’s writing from the horrific Kebad Kenya. I’m currently reading a selection published by Atlas Press. I owe a debt to flowerville for my introduction to Jahnn’s work,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Nietzsche Through Walter Kaufmann
Since I was seventeen I’ve read Nietzsche. I can no longer recall what I read first, probably the yellowing Thus Spake Zarathustra, annotated in two different pens, that still sits on my bookshelf....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Devilish State
In winter, my reading appetite requires more fibrous material. This year I reread Nietzsche and continue Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. As I read Kaufmann’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s early books I...
View Article