Lamenting The One-Size-Fits-All Culture
It is time to stop designing the world to fit the “average” human. The utmost opportunities lie in regarding people as individuals with a set of jagged features or a summation that differs from every other person anchored in their distinct life experiences, strengths, skills, knowledge, interests, goals, and narrative. Todd Rose writes in The […]
Catholicism: Shame and Punishment
American-Irish author Malachy McCourt writes in You’ve GOT to Read This Book!, a compilation by Gay Hendricks and Jack Canfield: Ninety-nine percent of teenage boys admit they think of nothing but sex—and the other 1% are liars. It’s a universal phenomenon, and yet this natural human urge was made out by the Church to be […]
Contribution = Happiness
We have to contribute because it is the only thing that will gives the highest happiness than any other thing in this world. From German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in The Wisdom of Life: … what a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has, or how he is regarded by others. […]
The Greatest Artist That Russia Has Yet Produced
Vladimir Nabokov writes in Lectures on Russian Literature: Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed the secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to […]
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 […]