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Category Archives: Right Living

Love.

14-Aug-13

http://civilwarbummer.com/s_ne.php “No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love.” – Arthur Schnitzler, quoted by Clive James. I’ve been reading James’ Cultural Amnesia, a fine book; essentially excerpts from James’ commonplace-book with essays built around them, on a general theme.  Probably for personal reasons, my […]

Marcellus.

12-Jun-13

purchase Lyrica canada “Possessing himself of the high points of the city, Marcellus, about break of day, entered Syracuse through the Hexapylum, all his officers congratulating him. But looking down from the higher places upon the beautiful and spacious city below, he is said to have wept much, commiserating the calamity that hung over it, when his thoughts […]

The Golden Spruce and our Forests.

19-Apr-13

A friend recently lent me a book and I repaid him by reading it. The book, The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant, is about an unusual Sitka spruce, several hundred years old, which had golden needles in place of the usual green ones. Golden foliage is an odd but regularly occurring plant mutation, highly prized […]

In Paradisum David Morgan.

08-Feb-13

There is not much that can be done in the face of our certain mortality. Two nights ago I heard from friends that David Morgan, professor of French Literature at Furman University and for several years one of the teachers at Rusticatio Virginiana, lay on his deathbed and had probably only hours to live. I […]

Maybe The Spiritual Life Is All About Having a Healthy Vagus Nerve.

04-Feb-13

The Atlantic seems to have discovered that we moderns have an insatiable appetite for anything plausibly scientific on the topic of love and marriage (or our lack thereof), and out comes another article, centering on the neurological experience of love.  Despite the attempt to headline this article with “there’s no such thing as everlasting love” […]

Jon Talton.

16-Jan-13

This guy is well worth reading.  This is an older piece, but he’s still got zip and actual insight.  He’s looking at the large issues and not just whatever the hell the head-chimps are tweeting.

Uruguay’s President, Who Lives on Less Money Than I Do.

05-Jan-13

What a fabulous profile.  We have a city called Cincinnati, and Uruguay has an actual Cincinnatus.  This is what Jefferson hoped for but neither was nor could help to create. It is not surprising that suffering – fourteen years in jail, more than ten in solitary confinement – helped to produce this.  Some kind of […]

Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung, Death.

20-Dec-12

I had the sudden conviction that I should finally more fully explore the writings of Marie-Louise von Franz, a second-generation Jungian whose writings I have been impressed by in the past.  I am in general always partial to people who have some kind of redemptive salvific Messianic purpose in their work: ‘Like all of us, […]

Winter in the Cabin.

01-Dec-12

For the past week it has been consistently cold and wintry here in the cabin.  There is snow on the ground, and I have to walk in from the road; my dirt driveway is now closed off.  Snowshoes are not required yet, but snow that has fallen is starting to pile up.  I spend some […]

Hitchens, Stegner, Mortality, and Moderns.

28-Nov-12

Sickness very much getting the better of me in the days following Thanksgiving, I spent three days indoors and very nearly all the time in bed. Having a great number of books at my disposal, being in the family house, for whatever inscrutable reason I read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality on Friday, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing […]