The New Romantics

"Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden."

- Voltaire

To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.

The internet is (mostly) a machine for light things.

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more

“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.”

We have become used to the ease and convenience of our digital lives, and we expect the same offline. A slick, transactional, no-strings-attached kind of life, predictable and controllable.

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

We live in an age of lexical abundance. More words, more access, more content than at any time in human history. And yet something essential is slipping away. Not reading itself, but the kind of reading that once shaped minds and formed character: slow, immersive, reflective, and richly human. As Harold Bloom noted: “"We read deeply for varied... See more