Sakharov, Pushkin, and the prison camp
Pushkin brings a desire for spiritual fulfillment between prisoners and their guard.
7
01, 2016
30
12, 2015
Times old and new: “objective” creative engagement vs. “subjective” inward regression
"As long as poets express merely their puny subjective impressions, they are not worth the name; but as soon as they know how to appropriate and express the world, they are poets. For then they are inexhaustible and can be constantly new, as opposed to a subjective nature, which quickly expresses its meagre inner life [...]
16
12, 2015
Society’s True Aristocrats
Every society is based on aristocracy, because this one, the true one, is demanding with regard to itself, and without this demand every society would die. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1954
11
12, 2015
Do scholars hurt the humanities and culture?
We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed.... [T]he objects of culture are not analyzable.... Great works of [...]
7
12, 2015
Joseph Conrad’s Terrorist
The stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be delivered – something really startling – a blow fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious [...]
24
11, 2015
The Oak
The angry north wind proved its strength one stormy night on a noble oak tree. Now it stood racked, and a great many lower branches lay shattered under it. A fox, which had its hollow nearby, saw it the next morning. "What a tree!" it exclaimed. "I would have never thought it was so large!" Gotthold [...]
12
11, 2015
The Temple of Daily Fame
Journalists have erected for themselves a small wooden chapel that they call the Temple of Fame, in which they continuously affix and remove portraits, making such a racket that one cannot hear oneself speak. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
5
11, 2015
Language and the sciences
How language lends itself to the sciences.
28
10, 2015
The peasant and the vine
Seeing how useful the vine was, the peasant supported it at a height with many props. Then, once he had harvested its grapes, he raised the stakes and let it fall, building a fire with the props. Leonardo da Vinci, Fables
27
10, 2015
Love and moral progress
If genuine love for a young man or for a woman does not seek witnesses, but reaps its harvest of pleasure even if it fulfills its desires in secret, then it is even more likely that someone who loves goodness and wisdom, who is intimate and involved with virtue because of his actions, will be [...]