Theodore Dreiser’s Realistic Portrayal of Life in America
Approbation for Theodore Dreiser as a literary pioneer has been loathing at best. Dreiser has been castigated for his longwinded, unstylish style and crude manner. American writer and literary critic Alfred Kazin writes in his introduction to The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, At a time when the one quality which so many American writers have […]
The Power of the Mind and Thoughts
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche writes in The Easy Middle, The mind is very powerful. There’s a tremendous strength there, and it makes such a big difference how this mind, this will, this intention is being steered. And everything depends on whether it allows itself to relax and be serene, or whether it allows itself to get […]
Living in Full Awareness of the World
Sarah Bakewell writes in How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer: Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world—and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as […]
Rabindranath Tagore’s Literary, Multicultural Upbringing
English literature academic Mary McClelland Lago remarked on the literary, multicultural household in which Rabindranath Tagore was raised in her biography, Rabindranath Tagore: Perspectives in Time: Goethe was read in German and de Maupassant in French, Sakuntala in Sanskrit, and Macbeth in English; poetry was written, upon models supplied by Keats, Shelley, and the Vaishnava […]
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Characters
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s central characters are marked by a significance of “spiritual and mental self-division and self-contradiction,” wherein the offender turns out to be an prototype of a curiously modern psychological condition of alienation and self-destruction. American literary critic and essayist Philip Rahv wrote, Dostoevsky is the first novelist to have fully accepted and dramatized the […]
Avoid Snobbery and Misanthropy
Christopher Hitchens writes in Letters to a Young Contrarian: One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no “people” waiting for just such an appeal. Any […]
The Craving of the Separate Self
Stephen Batchelor writes in Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening: Moods dictate my behavior. If something makes me feel good, I want to have it; if it makes me feel bad, I want to get rid of it; if it leaves me indifferent, I ignore it. I find myself in a perpetual state […]
Learning to Listen
Soto Zen Roshi Gerry Shishin Wick of Great Mountain Zen Center in Berthoud, Colorado, writes in Zen in the Workplace: To hear every sound as the dharma means to just pay attention. Listen to what people are saying when somebody is talking to you. We are usually so busy trying to say something that will […]
American Skier Lindsey Vonn on Competition, Grit, and Failures
Lindsey Vonn, the greatest female skier of all time, converses about sportsmanship in this Esquire interview: Competition is what I find joy in as well. I like pushing myself. I like setting those goals. I like knowing that I’ve executed the plan I have set forth. All those things feel good. I don’t mind the […]
Thought as a Thought and a Word as a Word
American poet, writer, and Soto Zen priest Norman Fischer writes in the Summer 2011 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, In his discussion of right speech the Buddha also demonstrated the subtle and nuanced understanding that words do not have fixed meanings and ought never to be taken at face value. The meaning of a […]