“My ego was suspended somewhere in space, and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa.”
Rewriting Reality: Lessons from Michael Pollan’s Psychedelic Journey
Eternity Is Nearer Every Day
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."
100th, From the Underground
“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
2024 Year End Review
Michael, David and Cal discuss their readings from 2024 and goals for 2025.
A. Lincoln
"If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I may seize the nearest stick and kill it. But if I found that snake in bed with my children that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide."
Ba’alzevuv
“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill.. You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? I’m the reason why… things are what they are.”
Rage, Achilles
This year I decided to fill in a gaping gap in my liberal arts knowledge of antiquity by committing to sitting down and reading one of the most influential works in the Western cannon – Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad is a collection of books in the style of a poem; it contains 24 books arranged... Continue Reading →
2023 Year Review
Michael, Cal and David discuss the books read over 2023.
An Accidentally United Little Lump of Something
“The question without answering which one cannot live: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”
La Peste
The Plague, a novel published by Albert Camus in 1947, was my first introduction to a subset of existentialist thought popularized by Camus known as absurdism. While much of the content of absurdism was covered in the earlier post on The Stranger, I did want to begin this post by familiarizing the reader with a... Continue Reading →
Brains and Brawn 