
Lord Byron: The Perils and Glories of a Classical Education

And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about. Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Orthodoxy

You're walking in the forest. You find a semi-abandoned hut and sit down at the table. After drinking a glass of water and quickly meditating, you open up your notebook. The page is empty.
Thomas Merton, you tell your notebook.
Thomas Merton was a Trappist Monk, it responds - You may have already read his famous book "The Seven Storey Mountain" which
... See moreIn any case, I stopped believing that "theo-ry" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?
- Elif Batuman,
The Possessed: Adventures w
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