Walt Whitman
By: Harold BloomIf you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. Read more
The Poetry of Existence
By: Llewelyn PowysPhoto: Erik RittenberryIf something in the words I publish here weekly stirs the blood, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This space runs on conviction, not algorithms. Paid support helps keep this newsletter alive. If you’re drawn to what’s beneath the surface, I’d love to have
Why We Read
By: Erik Rittenberry"You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.”— Susan SontagHarold Bloom, a noted literary critic, professor, and author who died in 2019, was perhaps the most enthusiastic and obsessive reader that we know of in history. At least recent
Jack Kerouac: Let’s all just say “the hell with it!”
Great Passages by Kerouac on his BirthdayLet’s all just say “the hell with it!” and become really creative at last… free, basking, wandering, idly stopping here and there, tasting, enjoying.”— Jack KerouacSubscribe nowHappy birthday to Jack Kerouac—novelist, poet, and icon of the Beat Generation—who
The Literary Front: Great Minds on the Butchery of War
All warfare is based on deceptionThe next war ... may well bury Western civilization forever.—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac…We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of t
How I Write
By: Bertrand RussellI cannot pretend to know how writing ought to be done, or what a wise critic would advise me to do with a view to improving my own writing. The most that I can do is to relate some things about my own attempts. Until I was twenty-one, I wished to write more or less in the style o
The Untrustworthy Speaker
By: Louise GlückText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDon’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. I don’t see anything objectively. I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that’s when I’m least to be trusted. It’s very s
Emil Cioran: On Individual and Cosmic Loneliness and the Weariness of Being Human
By: Emil CioranPhoto: David IngrahamOne can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world. Individual loneliness is a personal drama; one can feel lonely even in the midst of great natural beauty. An outcast in the world, indifferent to i
The Cult of Busyness and the Death of the Inner Life
By: Erik RittenberryPhoto: Erik Rittenberry“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.”― Federico FelliniThe Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, once wrote that ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen. That was long ago. If only
The Courage to Create
The Wisdom of Rollo May“Creative courage is the discovery of new forms, new patterns on which society can be built.” — Rollo MayWhat is the one quality possessed by all geniuses? How can we acquire creative courage? What takes place in the creative instant? How can creative power make your life rich
Carl Jung: 'Our Civilizing Potential Has Led Us Down the Wrong Path'
“Real improvement can be hoped for only if there is a radical change of consciousness. I fear all other measures will remain unreliable palliative since they do not penetrate to the depths where the evil is rooted and constantly renewed.”—Carl JungBy way of compensating for the loss of a world that
Trial by Fire
By: Albert HuffsticklerPhotograph: Dorothea LangeText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedLoneliness is a cold flame that flays the soul. When you pass through the fire you know things then no mortal man should know. You're Lazarus come from the dead living among men w
The Tree of Life
By: Emil CioranBy Peter Paul Rubens/ Jan Brueghel the Elder It is not good for man to keep reminding himself that he is man. To brood over oneself is bad enough; to brood over the species, with all the zeal of a fanatic, is worse still—it affords an objective basis, a philosophical alibi for the arb
Master, Serene
By: Fernando PessoaWinslow Homer, The Whittling Boy, 1873Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMaster, serene are All hours We waste, if in The wasting them, As in a jar, We set flowers. There are no sorrows Nor joys either In our life. So let us learn, Thoughtless
Michel Houellebecq: On Suffering and Learning to become a Poet
Learn to become poet; it’s to unlearn how to live. —Michel HouellebecqThe following is a segment from a provocative 1991 essay by the French novelist and poet, Michel Houellebecq. Like Schopenhauer, Houellebecq argues that suffering is not an accidental byproduct of existence. It is existential. “Al
Books and Nature
By: Mary OliverWinslow Homer - Girl Reading Under an Oak Tree (1879)Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. — Mary OliverSubscribe nowAdults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in
What the Hermit Teaches Us
By: Jean BiesPainting: Carl Spitzweg, 1844The spiritual master who has naturally renounced his name, his possessions, his ties and his ego has thus gained in inner richness; the Spirit has taken him over, has extended him to its size, has made him a being of the here and now, of everywhere and alway
Born Into This
By: Charles BukowskiPublished in The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992), Bukowski’s final major poetry collection issued during his lifetime, “Dinosauria, We”, one of my favorite poems of his, depicts a decaying society, a society where the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree, prisons overf
Metaphysical Outlaw
By: Erik RittenberryPhoto: Erik RittenberryDo not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.--Matsuo BashoText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI awake to the ethereal wind singing in the trees. The morning sky, the color of ashe overhead as
D.H. Lawrence: The Twighlight of the Soul
Art: Justin EscourtThere is twilight in our souls, neither light nor dark. The light must draw itself together in purity, the dark must stand on the other hand; they must be two complete in opposition, neither one partaking of the other, but each single in its own stead.— D.H. LawrenceSappho leaped