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This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine. “Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and… read article
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now. The astonishing thing is that even though we all have more or less the same perceptual… read article
“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on… read article
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a… read article
Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you free from expectation, unfiltered through your fantasies or needs, and it becomes love. Come to see anything or anyone this clearly — a falcon, or a mountain, or a patch of moss — and you will find yourself loving the world more deeply. One winter day, walking through the placid English countryside while on pandemic-forced sabbatical from her roiling job as a foreign policy political… read article
More in literature
This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine. “Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and… read article
A Guest Lecture featuring Sondre Rasch, co-founder and CEO of SafetyWing.
Perhaps the most interesting and even important person in Montaigne’s life – especially for his readers -- was not his wife nor his friend Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 left him bereft, but Marie de Gournay (1565-1645), the model of an autodidact, who taught herself Latin and translated Sallust, Ovid, Virgil and Tacitus. She wrote poetry and befriended Montaigne in 1588, four years before his death. Her first book, published in 1594, was Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne. After the essayist died, his widow, Françoise de la Chassaigne, gave Gournay a copy of the Essays and asked her to see them into print. In 1595 she published the first posthumous edition of the book, followed three years later by a revised edition. In 1588, Gournay became Montaigne’s fille d’alliance, a phrase for which there is no precise equivalent in English. In his 1965 biography of Montaigne, Donald Frame writes: “Usually rendered ‘adoptive daughter’ or ‘covenant daughter,’ this title was one of many by which often, in Montaigne’s times, persons unrelated by blood laid mutual claim to spiritual kinship.” Frame describes Gournay at the time of their first meeting as “an intense young woman of twenty-two, highly emotional and intellectual, not ugly but not by any means beautiful, with a broad forehead, wide-set eyes, straight nose, small mouth, and an expression both wistful and imperious.” It’s not excessive to say Gournay “fell” for Montaigne, though the relationship was never romantic and occasionally resembles a rock star/groupie pairing minus the sex. “Her devotion to him is unquestionable. A romantic, idealistic young bluestocking and apparently a born old maid . . . [s]he was to spend much of her life,” Frame writes, “as his executrix, editor, and archdefender against all critics.” Frame suggests Gournay may have altered and “embellished” several passages in her edited versions of the Essays to flatter herself. “In short, I cannot believe that Montaigne had anything like the feeling for Marie de Gournay that she had for him. An amiable man not accustomed to adulation, he was probably not immune to it. . . . Ailing and close to death, he basked in the warmth of the worshipful love.” In other words, both teacher and disciple were eminently human. I find Gournay interesting because of her autodidactic drive, her love of learning outside of a formal education. In From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), Jaques Barzun describes Gournay as “the adopted daughter of Montaigne (she adopted him), [who] did go in for philosophy. She was a woman of prodigious erudition, hobnobbing in Paris with all the leading celebrities. She edited two enlarged editions of Montaigne’s Essays, wrote a Defense of Poetry, a discourse On the French Language, a tract On the Small Value of Noble Rank. Most important, she wrote The Equality of Men and Women.” In a related passage Barzun writes: “Actually, the true Renaissance man should not be defined by genius, which is rare, or even by the numerous performing talents of an [Leon Battista] Alberti. It is best defined by variety of interests and their cultivation as a proficient amateur.”
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “In the Summer” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.
