Reads tagged with “culture”
Art in the Light of Conscience: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Loving vs. Understanding and the Paradoxical Psychology of Our Resistance to Ideas
“Not to go onwards (in verse, as in everything) means to go backwards — that is, to leave the scene.”
Hannah Arendt on Loneliness as the Common Ground for Terror and How Tyrannical Regimes Use Isolation as a Weapon of Oppression
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi… but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
The Conscience of Words: Susan Sontag on the Wisdom of Literature, the Danger of Opinions, and the Writer’s Task
“A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”
Marie Curie, Ambulance Driver: The Trailblazing Scientist’s Little-Known Humanitarian Heroism and Her Life-Saving Mobile X-Ray Units
How the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and her brilliant teenage daughter set out to mend the ugliness of war with ingenuity and sheer human courage.
The Difficult Art of Counter-Criticism: Rebecca Solnit on Celebrating Complexity, Savoring the Unquantifiable, and Defying the Urge to Simplify and Contain
“There is a kind of counter-criticism that … can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination.”
Annie Dillard on the Winter Solstice and How the Snowy Season Awakens Us to Life
“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
Physicist David Bohm on Creativity
“No really creative transformation can possibly be effected by human beings … unless they are in the creative state of mind that is generally sensitive to the differences that always exist between the observed fact and any preconceived ideas, however noble, beautiful, and magnificent they may seem to be.”
16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016
From loneliness to love to black holes, by way of Neil Gaiman, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver.
The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin, and the Art of “Inseeing”
How a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor co-created the modern concept of empathy.
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