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“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
That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our creative energies: the great calibrator of our certainties, the ultimate corrective for our self-righteousness, the reason we invented language and science and art. If there weren’t such an abyss between us and all that is not us, we never would have tried to bridge it with our microscopes and telescopes and equations seeking to know the vaster realities of nature beyond… read article
More in literature
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “In the Summer” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.
I no longer write in books, a decision I made decades ago that I occasionally regret. It came to feel like defacement. But it’s interesting to see what attracted, delighted or puzzled my younger self. Here are the three books on my shelves most heavily underlined and glossed: Ulysses, the Random House edition I bought in 1967 and read for the first time that year. With each subsequent reading, I added so many glosses I had to tape notepaper among the pages for annotations. The margins were full. On the title page I find such invaluable information as the etymology of Odysseus, the definition of parallax (with diagram), an explanation of the punningly named Ormond Hotel in “Sirens,” and this sentence fragment: “the madnesses [sic] of Deasy, Lyons, Breen, Farrell.” I probably wrote this in 1972, and I don’t remember writing it. Pascal’s Pensées, the Penguin paperback from 1961, translated by J.M. Cohen. I already had a taste for aphoristic prose, which is reflected in the passages underlined. I must have been reading the existentialists at the time. A disturbing number of references to Sartre. Dr. Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, another Penguin. Mostly underlinings rather than notes. I seem to have been especially impressed by Imlac. All three volumes are officially unreadable. Ulysses has a broken spine and binding. Pascal and Johnson are in two pieces held together with rubber bands. My attachment to them is sentimental. In Johnson’s Dictionary I discovered an appropriate verb, “to postil”: “To gloss; to illustrate with marginal notes.”
On guns, MTV, Stephen King, and the nightmare from which we cannot awake The post Jeremy Spoke in Class Today appeared first on The American Scholar.
“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
Does cutting costs mean robbing oneself of life’s small delights? The post On (Middle-Class) Frugality appeared first on The American Scholar.
