Sublime

‘Dorian Gray’.

“Truly,” he cried, “the heavens must have wept the day they created a man of such generosity, such selfless spirit, as your master! Please, do not weep! Instead, take this gift and know that I would gift thee with my very beating heart should you request it.”

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

he wrote a series of historical essays and was among the first to depict Lincoln as “a towering figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.” His perceptive diary, which he edited in his last years, remains one of the most valuable sources on the dynamics within the Lincoln administration.

Une envie terrible d’en découdre avec le monde le grisa comme si ces premières heures passées sur l’île l’éveillaient. De tout son cœur, il lui fallait devenir le plus fort, le plus doué, faire régner sa loi bien qu’il n’eût aucun code à présenter. « La liberté ou la mort », pensa-t-il confusément, sans même vraiment réaliser ce que cela impliquait

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke

We bond over one recent movie, Shadowlands, the story of British writer C. S. Lewis. I tell Brooke that the movie struck a chord with me. There was Lewis’s close relationship with his brother. There was his sheltered life, walled off from the world. There was his fear of risk and the pain of love. But then one singularly brave woman makes him see t

“No he did not,” Dunham retorts. “He did,” Karr assures her. She reflects on the experience: “I was so glad that I had turned it off. I got to help him to feel a little better or whatever, feel like he had some agency in the world. What did that cost me? Do you know what I mean? For me, a lot of times I walk into Mass and I look at people and I thi

Murdoch believed that one of the core projects that each of us needs to undertake is to “unself”. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

For Murdoch, there is no backstage self. As long as we