A proper analysis of this book can only be executed by readers with a thorough knowledge of early 19th-century literary tropes and gender roles. I am no such reader. To me, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities felt like a soap opera from a parallel universe (i.e. Europe’s romantic period). While containing some terrific turns […]
I am getting married in two weeks, and my officiant––who is also a dear friend and fellow book-lover––recommended Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring as an aid for writing my wedding vows. I can’t imagine a better text for helping someone approach the joyful yet intimidating project of marriage. This isn’t just one of the best books […]
“In the context of a man’s life, caring has a way of ordering his other values and activities around it. When this ordering is comprehensive, because of the inclusiveness of his carings, there is a basic stability in his life; he is ‘in place’ in the world, instead of being out of place, or merely […]
Apparently I have become too much of a stuffy grown-up to appreciate this book. I can’t vouch for how younger versions of me would have reacted to this, and I’ll admit that it could have made a big impression at the right age or moment of development. As it is, I cannot figure out why […]
Having now read almost all of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, I can safely say that they should be required reading for all humans. Was Banks the smartest or most creative science fiction writer of all time? Definitely not. Was his grasp of science and futurism vastly superior to that of his many talented contemporaries? […]
It’s been nearly a decade since my favorite undergraduate philosophy professor introduced me to Owen Flanagan. Flanagan is part of a vibrant but relatively new philosophical niche: naturalized ethics. The field plumbs the depths of philosophical history, plucks out tidbits that harmonize with modern findings about the capabilities and constraints of the embodied mind and […]
“I don’t know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I’ve studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over…whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, […]
“Suppose I have a great meal or a great sexual experience. It is over. I have good memories of the experience but I am disappointed that it is over. Why be disappointed? It was a good experience and now it is over. All good things come to an end. Things change, I change. That’s the […]
“Ah yes, here we have the nasty big flat rock, sitting doing nothing, just amoral and dull, and it sits like an island in the polluted pool. The pool is a tiny lake on the little island, and the island is in a drowned crater. The crater is a volcanic crater, the volcano forms part […]
“You could see anything in the rain. The individual drops became streaks with the slowness of the eye; they merged and re-emerged as ciphers for the shapes you carried inside you; they lasted less than a heartbeat in your sight and they went on forever. He saw a chair, and a ship that was not […]