The Great Paradox of Poetry
Seamus Heaney wrote in The Government of the Tongue, Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brntality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of […]
Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism
Rob Norton writing about Douglas Brinkley’s Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress (2003) in the Winter 2003 issue of strategy+business magazine: Brinkley deals squarely with Ford’s most unattractive trait of all: his vicious anti-Semitism. After running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1918, Ford bought a local newspaper, […]
Opportunity Cost When Buying Property
In a recent podcast, British advertising guru Rory Sutherland said, I made the decision to underspend on property on the grounds that nearly everybody else was effectively maxing themselves out. The default behavior of housing was to buy as much as you can borrow. That assumes the greatest return on happiness comes from property expenditure. […]
The Desire to Acquire Companies
Niccolo Machiavelli writes in Chapter III (“De Principati Misti”) of The Prince (Italian: De Principatibus): The desire to acquire is a very common and natural thing; and when a man who is capable of doing it makes the attempt, he will generally be praised, or at least not blamed; error and blame arise when a […]
Can’t Turn Our Backs on the Global Economy
In The Weightless Society, Charles Leadbeater explains: Globalization is good. Through global trade in products and services, people learn and exchange ideas that drive economic growth. If we turn our backs on the global economy, we turn our backs on the most vital force: the accelerating spread of knowledge and ideas. A thriving knowledge society […]
Study Yourself
Pema Chodron writes in The Wisdom of No Escape, What you will discover as you continue to study the dharma to practice meditation is that nothing you have ever heard is separate from your life. Dharma is the study of what is, and the only way you can find out what is true is through […]
The Agricultural Revolution
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did […]
Anger Has Something to Teach Us
Zen teacher Jules Shuzen Harris writes in his article Uprooting the Seeds of Anger from the Summer 2012 issue of the Tricycle: The Buddhist Review magazine: We operate under a common illusion that the things that make us angry lie outside ourselves, that they are external to us. Something out there is in opposition to […]
The Genius of Horace
University of Chicago’s Professor of Comparative Literature W. R. Johnson writes in his foreword to The Essential Horace, a translation by Burton Raffel Ovid succeeded in writing the greatest poem in the Latin language. … Propertius wrote the most original and artistic poetry in Latin. … Lucretius wrote the most intelligent and most ingenious poem […]
Shakespeare’s Power of Communication
English critic William Hazlitt writes in On Shakespeare and Milton, The striking feature of Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds,—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one particular bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like […]