My friend Ruth Zylberman sent me these two short letters from an eight-year-old boy to his grandmother during the 1936 purges in the Soviet Union. The first: Dear Babushka, I’m not dead yet. You’re the only one I have in the world and I’m the only one you have. If I don’t die, when I’m grown up and you’re very, very old, I’ll work and take care of

yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

Diogenes,

The writer André Malraux relates a discussion he had with an old priest: ‘You’ve spent fifty years listening to people in the secrecy of the confessional, what have you learned about the human soul?’ The priest: ‘Two things. First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks. And second, there is no such thing as grown-ups.’ There are no gr

‘You’re not being asked to believe anything. Absolutely not. ‘Don’t believe: try. Take the plunge.

As the I Ching, the ancient book of divination that is at the source and heart of Chinese thought, says: ‘Perfect grace consists not in exterior ornamentation of the substance, but in the simple fitness of its form.’

still remember it – vividly if confusedly – as being inspired by the Bardo in a way that’s as powerful as Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

I’ll say more about the Bardo, and in that context about a fantastic short story

At length I explained to him that life had brought me to a dead end from which there was no exit, and that the only way out for me was suicide. When you say something like that, you expect to be contradicted. But instead of contradicting me, Roustang had said softly: ‘You’re right. Suicide doesn’t get very good press these days, but sometimes it’s