Eric Scheske

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Literature

Literature

“The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. The novelist says to the reader: things are not as simple as you think.” Milan Kundera It thereby is a rebuke to the left hemisphere and its preference for neat, predictable, and efficient abstraction. Reading is also frustratingly aimless and, to the left hemisphere's way of stilted thinking, a waste of time.

Carting Away Hobbits

Carting Away Hobbits

I've started to re-read The Lord of the Rings. While listening to Brad Birzer's three-part interview on the National Review “Great Books” podcast, I realized that I had forgotten a lot of things about the books. More troubling, I had forgotten a lot of the charming

The Tolkien Companion

I earlier endorsed The Complete Guide to Middle Earth by Robert Foster. But if you're really into Tolkien and literary oddities, check out J.E.A. Tyler's The Tolkien Companion [https://amzn.to/3r68JBB] (as a matter of aesthetics, principle, and everything that is good on

Dostoyevsky's Mock Execution

Dostoyevsky's Mock Execution

In 1849, political radicals were taken out of their jail to be executed. They were lined up in front of the firing squad. Right before the guns were fired, a courier galloped up with an imperial decree, commuting the death sentence to a term in prison camp. The whole thing

Proto-Kerouac

Proto-Kerouac

D.H. Lawrence, writing in the early 1920s, about the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892). “The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not 'above'. Not even 'within'. The soul is neither 'above' nor '

Camus on Nihilistic Man

Camus on Nihilistic Man

European travel, elections, mass media, and other “gloriously normal” things might sustain the rest of society because society has effectively given up on meaning and has therefore settled for such things in substitution, but they are shallow and hence aren't fit for a sensitive soul like Franny'

Salinger's Nihilistic Man

Salinger's Nihilistic Man

Like Camus' hero Sisyphus, Salinger's two novels look at nihilistic man, the man who has given up the possibility of finding a meaning–a response–from the universe's wall of indifference. The novels are based on the condescending, though largely accurate, presumption that modern society

Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus meditates on the “absurd hero” Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology. Sisyphus was a crafty man who repeatedly betrayed and disobeyed the gods. As punishment, he was sentenced to an eviternity of rolling a huge rock to the top of a

Camus on the Absurd

Camus on the Absurd

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem, that of suicide. To judge that life is or is not worth the trouble of being lived, this is to reply to the fundamental question of philosophy.” These words stand at the beginning of Albert Camus' philosophy. The question of suicide

Alyosha Karamazov

Alyosha Karamazov

There were four Karamazov brothers: Dmitri, the sensualist–loving God but indulging his sins; Ivan, the intellectual–unable to believe in a good God; Smerdyakov, the twisted and cunning bastard son–and parricide; Alyosha, the monk and budding saint–a handsome young man who loves God and humanity. Few literary