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Jacob Bronowski on the Missing Shakespeare of the Bushmen
Jacob Bronowski–who so entertained and edified many of us with The Ascent of Man–was very often a wise man but he was also Eurocentric, a weakness that produced astonishingly reductive views about the...
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‘The Spring is The Autumn’
In ‘Henriette Wyeth: Scenes from a painter’s life’ (from A Certain Climate, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1988, pp. 164) Paul Horgan makes note of, and subsequently quotes Wyeth on, the...
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William H. Gass On The Dialectical Nature Of Love
In Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translations (Perseus Books, New York, 1999, pp. 13) William H. Gass writes: During childhood, contradiction paves every avenue of feeling, and we grow...
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Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Mountains Of The Mind
A few years ago, while visiting my brother in India, I browsed through his collection of mountaineering books (some of them purchased by me in the US and sent over to him.) In Robert MacFarlane‘s...
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The Most Valuable Philosophical Lesson Of All
I’m often asked–by non-academics, natch–if anything in my philosophical education has been of value to me in the conduct of my lived life. I have found this question hard to answer in the terms my...
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F. O. Matthiessen On ‘The Value Of The Tragic Writer’
In The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, New York, p. 107), F. O. Matthiessen writes: The value of the tragic writer has always lain in the uncompromising honesty with which he has...
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John Forbes’‘Love Poem’: War As Entertaining, Compensatory, Lullaby
Reading Kath Kenny‘s wonderful essay on the Australian poet John Forbes–a personal and literary take on his life and work–reminded me that because I was introduced to Forbes’ poetry by his close...
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Goethe On The ‘Inexhaustible’ Poet
In Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm credits Goethe as having “developed the idea of man’s productivity into a central point of his philosophical thinking….all decaying cultures are characterized by...
View ArticleThe Indifferent ‘Pain Of The World’
In All the Pretty Horses (Vintage International, New York, 1993, pp. 256-257), Cormac McCarthy writes: He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth...
View ArticleThe Self As Prison
In his review of Charles Simic‘s The Lunatic: Poems and The Life of Images: Selected Prose Phillip Lopate makes note of Simic’s “cultivation of awe,” his “opening himself to chance, that favorite...
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