Jonathan Simcoe

After the thrill of independence and experiments in self-actualization, drinking your so-called “potential for Being” to the dregs, when the exhaustion starts to set in and then eventually morphs into a kind of self-disgust, you can reach a point where you know you want a different life but are enchained to the one you’ve made.

For Augustine, the interior journey into memory is central to this expansion of the soul-mansion. In Book X of his Confessions, which I think is one of the most beautiful things in all western culture, he writes this - it makes me think of Morpheus and Neo in their white room:I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the tre

Far from the mountains in winter, I discovered the blurred photo of Everest in Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels.

Second, they don’t believe they earned their fame.

It is crucial for us to recognize that our ultimate loves, longings, desires, and cravings are learned. And because love is a habit, our hearts are calibrated through imitating exemplars and being immersed in practices that, over time, index our hearts to a certain end. We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we sh

The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the veils were become that still warded it off.

By age 15 Bach was ready to establish himself in the musical world, and he immediately showed immense talent in a variety of areas. He become a soprano (women weren't permitted to sing in church) in the choir of Lüneburg's Church of Saint Michael. Three years later, he was a violinist in the chamber orchestra of Prince Johann Ernst of Weimar. After