Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The myths we choose, or more likely simply inherit, do a tremendous amount of intellectual heavy lifting for us. Even more than the empty words and phrases of Orwell’s “tired hack on the platform,” these myths do our thinking for us. We can’t do without them; the making of analogies is intrinsic to thinking, and we always and inevitably strive to u
... See moreAlan Jacobs • How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
The deracination of literature
unherd.com
At its core is thus a dialectic of the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local. Moreover, the “literature” in world literature marks the plane of equivalence and comparability between historically distinct and particular traditions of writing
Mufti_Intro_to dossier 2
The first line of My First Book —“He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b”—is language ripped from chat forums (and the rest of the short story collection follows suit). In his review for the New York Times , Dwight Garner admits that he had to look up “haplogroups,” but that he “responded to the way these senten... See more
Greta Rainbow • IYKYK: When Novels Speak a Language Only Part of the Internet Gets | The Walrus
"Niels Lyhne"
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
Literature creates meaning, and meaning is crucial to the human project as such. Although literature creates meaning indirectly, and by symbolic means, so do all the rest of our meaning-generating systems, functioning as they do by way of representations. Literature is the most fine-grained and particular of the meaning-making systems, and is there
... See more