I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.
Friedrich Nietzsche on The Difference Between a Scientist and a Philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche dedicated his book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873) to an extremely important part in the history of philosophy: philosophy before Socrates. In a chapter dedicated to Thales, he offers a…
Max Frisch’s Questionnaire
I just started browsing the diaries (or the Sketchbook 1966-1971) by Swiss writer and architect Max Frisch. And the opening chapter is called “Questionnaire”. As in his diary Frisch was preoccupied by the questions of…
Lawrence Durrell’s Praise for Tropic of Cancer
Where all the other people like Joyce and Lewis got stuck in the morass and dirt of modern life, Miller conies out on the other side with a grin, whole, hard and undamaged.
Henry Miller’s Wisdom; Or What Matters In Life
My ideal is to be free of ideals, free of principles, free of isms and ideologies. I want to take to the ocean of life like a fish takes to the sea.
“I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
I am not exactly sure how I got to know the work of Nikos Kazantzakis. It might be through some letters of Lawrence Durrell or Henry Miller. In either case, I am pretty sure the…
Joseph Brodsky on Boredom
I remember reading somewhere a hypothesis that people stopped killing witches because it became boring. You kill one, or see one of the killings, and what is there to be seen next time?
A Few Notes On The History of Clocks
I accidentally started reading about the history of clocks. First, I stumbled upon a sweet book by Swedish historian Peter Englund. Unfortunately, majority of his books are written in Swedish and aren’t translated into English…
Karl Popper on the Difference Between Successful and Creative Thinking
“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover”, said Henri Poincaré, a famous French mathematician. As an expansion on Poincaré’s succinct thought, Popper gives an unsurprising explanation of the intuition part of creativity…