Jefferson City “Some people here [at the American Academy in Rome] are snobbish about this mess but it belongs to anyone who can dig it.” – Ralph Ellison
Category Archives: Right Living
The Classics, In Brief
10-Feb-21Middle Age.
09-May-20So much to do, most of it the necessary sort. Children, house, declining body. I think of the way Jung describes the middle of his career: With my work at Burgholzi life took on an undivided reality – all intention, consciousness, duty, and responsibility. It was an entry into the monastery of the world, a […]
Today marks five hundred years since Raphael’s death; and a further tradition states that April 6th is the day of his birth as well. I’ve always loved School of Athens, and the Disputa, but really the piece by Raphael that moves me most is a preparatory sketch, one he executed for his final painting, the […]
Shakespeare, In Praise of More Babies.
10-Mar-20When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer’s green all girded […]
“… With the Hippo and the Flamingo.”
24-Feb-20“Berkeley Cole and I, in a private jargon of ours, distinguished between respectability and decency, and divided up our acquaintances, human and animal, in accordance with the doctrine. We put down domestic animals as respectable and wild animals as decent, and held that, while the existence and prestige of the first were decided by their […]
One of Richard Rohr’s spiritual dicta is that how you do one thing is how you do everything: that there tends to be an organic unity to people, and even to cultures. The same problem tends to resurface everywhere. Another of his dicta is that you don’t think your way to a new way of […]
Cheryl Strayed’s Vita Nuova.
12-Feb-15In my previous essay about Cheryl Strayed’s excellent book Wild, I took as my theme the nature of the experience Strayed had, a truly transformational one which ultimately changed her perspective on almost all the issues of importance. Tranformation of perspective like this is called in Greek metanoia, a wonderful word which implies both alteration […]
Wisdom.
09-Feb-15“Wisdom consists of doing the next thing that you have to do, doing it with all your heart, and doing it with delight… and that delight is a sense of the sacred.” – Helen Luke
A Norwegian newspaper has created a reality show that involves sending three fashion bloggers to Cambodia to work in a Cambodian sweatshop. This is an effective show for several reasons – the beauty of the young Norwegians, the fact that beautiful women in distress makes for good television, the enjoyment people get from watching spoiled […]
The Strange Obligation of Happiness
02-Aug-20http://prepaid365awards.co.uk/2014/06/855/cyber-crime-costing-world-economy-billions/ Reginald Foster on doing what you want: “I say, ‘dummodo felicissimi sint.’ You have to be happy, because that calendar over there in the corner, it’s turning over, and it’s not going to wait for you, and when you’re dead no one’s going to care.”