Notes Towards an Applied Literature
Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the ... See more
Maria Popova • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook. As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will te
... See moreMaria Konnikova • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity (Work series)
The School of Life • 2 highlights
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To Russian literary theorist Roman Jakobson, literature represents ‘organised violence committed on ordinary speech’—it has to unsettle and disturb.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
The triumph of the digital seems to have also brought the triumph of the factual. As literature, as the idea of literature, suffers depreciation, it gets ever harder to make the case for imagination. And what is imagination if not the animating power of inwardness? The subjective self takes in the world and fashions meaning; art and religion are it
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