“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a […]
“I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail […]
Of the many paradoxes that bedevil human nature, one of the most intriguing is our tendency to seek out freedom while simultaneously longing for submission. American philosopher Josiah Royce understood this well: We profoundly want both to rule and to be ruled. We must be each of us at the centre of his own active […]
American philosopher John Dewey defines art as “the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously…the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature” (Art as Experience, 26). In this sense, novels can be understood as records of imagined experience that harness a reader’s mental apparatus in order to […]
“The facade of a grand building rises gracefully, pilastered and crenelated. Stately wings soar on either side, somehow both heavy and light. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing […]
Prefatory Note: This essay constitutes a new experiment for words&dirt. I’ve recently been inspired by some of my readers, as well as an excellent interview with Maria Popova, to write a reflection on my last year of reading. Many book enthusiasts use the New Year as an opportunity to create “Best Of” lists, but I’ve […]
“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” ––All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, pg. 328 “The rise of a popular press and […]
“‘Sublimity,’ Hauptmann says, panting, ‘you know what that is Pfennig?’ He is tipsy, animated, almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. ‘It’s the instant when one thing is about to become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result. Boy to man.’” ––All the Light We Cannot […]
“Dr. Geffard teaches her the names of shells––Lambis lambis, Cypraea moneta, Lophiotoma actua––and lets her feel the spines and apertures and whorls of each in turn. He explains the branches of marine evolution and the sequences of the geologic periods; on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of […]
Right so asking a guy like me to critique James Joyces Ulysses is like asking a blind man to critique a silent film Ive neither the know how nor the gumption to properly assess something I have little chance of understanding and would be skeptical of anyone who claimed to comprehend it comprehensively so rather […]