Two Learned Men; Six Volumes
I only have the single volume "Section," but it's enjoyable
Biography
Way of the Right Brain: Chuang-Tzu’s Genius
Seven and a half centuries before Bodhidharma started Zen by melding Buddhism to Taoism, Chuang-Tzu danced through the world.
This sly jester is second only to the old sage Lao-Tzu in Tao greatness.
Chuang-Tzu championed wu-wei—the art of non-doing, of letting the world spin without your sweaty grip on
Montaigne: Smiling Skeptic
Montaigne spat on every dogma and system that strutted through the intellectual barnyard of his day. His motto: Que sais-je? (What do I know?) His answer, delivered with a smirk: Not a daggone thing.
“There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.”
Montaigne
Logic? Pfft. He’
The Stud that Was H.L. Mencken
Every so often, I plunge headlong into a Mencken spree, a vice I’ve nursed since the early 1990s when I first stumbled into Ann Arbor’s Dawn Treader Bookstore and smelled those old books (that odd but pleasing scent, I’m told, comes from vanilla releasing from the aging
Why Weak Fools Can Dominate
Exploring the fool in Christ and the fool in Antichrist. Ivan the Terrible v. Nicholas of Pskov. Nietzsche v. Everyone
Introducing Blaise Pascal: The First Anti-Modern
If we’re going to battle against modernity, we need to recognize our champions. Pascal might have been the first.
Something Tells Me I’d Really Enjoy the Private Letters of Two Men I Didn’t Even Know Existed
It helps to be aware of one’s ignorance.
That’s one reason I like to read Joseph Epstein, who wrote a delightful essay for the current issue of the new Catholic journal, The Lamp that brought my level of awareness to the brim.
The topic?
The letters of George
We're on Information Overload. Here's One Solution
One forgotten ancient suggests what we might do with all of today's information
We Either Flee Devils or Fight Them
Toward the end of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells himself he will move out West and shut himself off from everyone and everything, possibly by posing as a deaf-mute.
If he pretends to be a deaf-mute, he reasons, people would have to write messages to him on
How Not to Sacrifice if You're a Father
Hint: Don't be Rousseau
I’ve been reading some Nock. Albert Jay Nock, one of the premier American essayists of the early twentieth century and one of the founders of modern conservative/libertarian thought.
A weighty man, that Nock.
But also a disturbing man. In a 1964 biography,