To be, or not to be? This each living thing must ask upon being captured by that infinite web of Life, and be born. But like on a dew pearled fragile gossamer, each life clings to its being. And thus we must live, or die.
William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet
T.S. Eliot
The Wasteland
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
That’s quite a collection of books. I think there is more than just to be or not to be. How to be might be of importance, too. Some questions to the eds.
John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men
Oh dear,
Some of mine, Ivan
Femininity is a power beyond the reason of men, or women:
They dared to go where none had gone before...
"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches." -Emerson
Does the mind of the philosopher dwell among the gods of love or the gods of hatred? Life is to be cherished, but not at any prise. Upholders of the religion of science believe that the most important thing is to keep human genes alive. What would be the use of colonising a new planet by a race that has already destroyed one?
Recently, while listening to an intellectual exchange (in Socratic sense real erotic love of wisdom) I felt that, for a long time, there was enough air to breathe. It sounded like: Welcome home, spirit. Sometimes, and unfortunately not seldom, the air is thick of hatred and pettiness of mind. It’s totally forgivable if an animal or even a small child believes that all means, even the evil ones, to own satisfaction are justified. We know that they miss the capacity for moral thinking. On the other hand, when the quantity of experience and knowledge increases, don’t we expect that the sense of responsibility grows in proportion? A well read philosopher with great intellectual mind would be on top of telling just from unjust, necessary from unnecessary, worthy from unworthy, wise from stupid and beautiful from ugly. And not only telling, but doing accordingly as well. Ever since Plato, the idea of a sort of marriage between the universal and the individual will, or mind and body, has time after time been presented by philosophers. When only I know enough I do the right decision. I am not a prisoner of my own or other mind, but able to choose what is the (absolutely) best. When will this time come? When will we be one with the universe, without imagining to be the universe?
Agathon: “He [love] does not walk on the ground, nor on the skulls (which are not at all soft), but walks and lives in the softest of all things. He makes his home in the characters and minds of gods and humans; and not in all minds, one after another, but whenever he finds one with a tough character he moves on, and whenever he finds one with a soft character he settles down. Since he is in continual contact with the softest members of the softest type of thing, not just with his feet but with all of him, he must be extremely sensitive.” (The Symposium.)
Often we fail to be sensitive enough, but only few of us are programmed to kill, and none of us is born as such. Isn’t the philosopher a lover of wisdom?
April the cruellest month? Only if you don’t accept that life is a circle.
By Eds. on Monday, February 17, 2003 - 12:51 pm:Charles Dickens
Great Expectations
John Steinbeck
Grapes of Wrath
Victor Hugo
Les Miserables
Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth
Feodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
"But that is the beginning of a new story--the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life." --Feodor D.
By Monday on Tuesday, February 18, 2003 - 12:11 pm:
Thanks for wasting your time
Google
By Monday on Tuesday, February 18, 2003 - 12:17 pm:
One has to be a Monday to miss the links. Now you have to find them yourself. Here is a good book site:
http://cafes.mirror.org/gbcafe2.cgi?read=44393
By Ivan A. on Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 12:33 am:
Jerzy Kozinsky
Being There.
Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children
Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha
Charles Doughty
Arabia Deserta
Somerset Maugham
The Razor's Edge
Rudyard Kipling
Mandalay
"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be --
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay..."
By Eds. on Thursday, February 20, 2003 - 10:35 pm:
"Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness." --George Sand
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
George Sand
La Mare au Diable
Emily Jane Bronte
Wuthering Heights
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
* * * * * * * * * *
Additional submission by Celsia, on women authors:
Angela Carter, "The Bloody Chamber"
Toni Morrison, "The Bluest Eye"
Maya Angelou "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
Virginia Woolf "Orlando"
By Eds. on Sunday, March 16, 2003 - 03:12 pm:
Frank Herbert
Dune
Isaac Asimov
Foundation
Gene Roddenberry
Star Trek
Arthur C. Clark, Stanley Kubrik
2001: A Space Odyssey
Robert Heinlein
Stanger in a Strange Land
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan, and The Chess Men of Mars
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World
George Orwell
1984
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
Jules Verne
Journey to the Center of the Earth
By Eds. on Sunday, March 23, 2003 - 02:25 pm:
Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
Emily Dickinson
Poems
Henry Wadsworth Longellow
The Song of Hiawatha
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
James Fenimore Cooper
The Last of the Mohicans
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
"So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man." -Tom Sawyer