Anna B
@annabwriting
Anna B
Plato having anointed truth as the goal of philosophy, the goal of human life. ‘Assuredly we must be bold to speak what is true, above all when our discourse is upon truth
Crispin Sartwell • Truth Is Real and Philosophers Must Return Their Attention to It
“literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and nonexisent.” We lack a language to capture “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain,” and if we
... See moreBrian Dillon • On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf
Plato’s truth is identical not only with the beautiful, but with the good and the just.
Crispin Sartwell • Truth Is Real and Philosophers Must Return Their Attention to It
“Anyone who tells you there are universal rules to how to add an apostrophe ending in S is either wrong or lying,” Jeffrey Barg, a grammar columnist, said. “You can’t be wrong as long as you’re consistent.”
Ben Hickey • Is It Harris’ or Harris’s? Add a Walz, and It’s Even Trickier.
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
Langston Hughes • Let America Be America Again
https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again
This poem kept me going during the insanity of the Trump years.
The End and the Beginning
By Wisława Szymborska
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop
... See moreThis is the best poem on war I think I have ever read.
Interpreter of Maladies: On Virginia Woolf’s Writings About Illness and Disability
Gabrielle Bellotlithub.comThe essay ends in a kind of dream—with the image of a plush red curtain clasped and crushed in grief. And we’re happy to follow Woolf there, in part, because of that dash in her opening sentence, which denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing.