Sublime

You have to be a certain kind of person to make this book work for you: the kind of person who, at least some of the time, cares more about working toward the truth than about one’s current social position.

Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.

Then, with a flash of his old ambition, he said, ‘Philosophy has to be built up all over again from the beginning.’ He died on 27 April 1938, aged seventy-nine. The nursing sister who attended him said afterwards, to Malvine, ‘He died like a holy man.’ Edmund Husserl was cremated, because of the fear that a gravestone in a cemetery might be desecra

Charles Segal, a recently retired Harvard professor of classics who taught my Greek Tragedy course, spoke about how the Oedipus trilogy reminded him of Erik Erikson’s three stages of development. In youth, Professor Segal said, a person struggles to figure out who they are in relation to their parents (a real head scratcher in Oedipus’s case). In m

One of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous defined ego as “a conscious separation from.” From what? Everything.

What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality—oneself—which is