Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Robert Pirsig inspired a generation to philosophical reflection—and organizing their thoughts—with his hugely popular novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. In a somewhat less well-known later book (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, he endeavors to establish a way of thinking about
... See moreDaniel J. Levitin • The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
We were to read Thomas Hobbes in the first seminar I attended. Strauss began without further ado to say that we would read only the first two parts of the Leviathan, that this was "disgraceful" but that we would have our hands full doing justice to even that much. After that, he turned unceremoniously to some introductory remarks.
The first
You must not ‘identify’ with Stephen Dedalus or Fanny Price; you must not regard Madame Bovary as a denunciation of the bourgeoisie or Bleak House as an attack on the legal system; you must not ransack novels in search of those bloated topicalities, ‘ideas’. The only things that a good reader needs are imagination, memory, a dictionary and some
... See moreMartin Amis • The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)
provisional,
Aldous Huxley • The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
