Rishita Chaudhary

“When Sontag read Gide’s journals, she identified so deeply with his thinking, she wrote, ‘I am not only reading this book, but creating it myself.’” Reading can offer an experience of communion: a synthesis can occur when the thinking self, or internal monologue, merges with the author’s.

Travel in both its literal and symbolic avatars is the process of acquiring cognitive empathy. When you visit somewhere with different norms to those that you have known so far, the realization dawns that those norms are not “normal.” Every person’s experience of the world is particular, but this specificity only becomes obvious when another way of... See more

tech journalist Max Read notes, some of the best newsletters offer “a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of ‘thinking through,’ to which subscribers are invited.”

Pessoa, however, went beyond masking to a kind of deliberate dissociation. In a section of “The Book of Disquiet” titled “How to Dream Metaphysics,” he prescribes a method for dissolving consciousness, which in its rigor resembles a manual on self-hypnosis, or a set of religious exercises. First comes the reading of novels, which trains you to care... See more