I am part of the greatest book club in the world. AND, during these strange, strange times, we are meeting on line so anyone can join us. You can find us at Stories That Matter (NC). In April we are finishing our reading of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.…
Looking up at the stars after an abhorrent and senseless tragedy, the title character in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek, turns to the narrator, a man who had lived entangled in books, and pleads: ‘What can be happening up there?’ . . . ‘Can you tell me, boss/ he said,…
How do we judge a work of art? Can we meaningfully compare Tolstoy and Dickens, or Austin and Proust? Is it a purely subjective matter? Or are some works objectively better than others? When someone recommends a book to us, how are we to tell if it is one that…
I am excited to announce that my first full book is now available. (You can find it here.) Mud and Dreams is a series of essays on the poetry and science of living. A work of “motivational poetics” the book speaks directly to the human concerns at the center of…
In the Republic, Plato gives us his “allegory of the cave”. Prisoners who are chained to their spots underground see only images flickering on the wall. They have no other reality. They are shown shadows of puppets without dimensions, without substance. Our poor little creatures know nothing else of life.…
Jack Kornfield tells stories of forgiveness, heroic and true. Of Buddhist nuns brutally imprisoned for saying their prayers, afraid only that they would lose their compassion for their captors. Or of the mother who welcomed the killer of her child into her home, and nurtured him and made him kind. They…
Many of you know I host various philosophy and well-being discussions groups each month throughout the Raleigh-Durham area. You can find us here. At our lunch meeting last week, we had a wide-ranging and robust discussion on enlightenment, presence, and the relationship between sacred experience and the connections between people.…
In January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche went insane. Armed with metaphor, irony and aphorism, the German philosopher carved his influence deep into 20th century culture, criticism, literature and psychology. Freud, Mann, Yeats, Richard Strauss and countless other artists and thinkers were shaped by the “first Immoralist”. In popular culture, Nietzsche was…