The Stepping Stones to Eternity — from Flowering Poverello
From the Flowering Poverello blog, a poetry sequence which, for some reason, especially resonated. I will let it speak for itself, except the resonance began with the opening lines “I…
Category: false dichotomies
The late Michel Serres on angels and messengers
At the start of this month, the French thinker Michel Serres died aged 88. He had an eclectic range of interests, as evinced by his Wikipedia page: Over the next…
“The decline of industries left woodland open to destruction” – Oliver Rackham on how industry saves woodland
That the natural world is rarely entirely “natural” is a bit of a truism, one I’ve reflecting on since reading “Curlew Moon” by Mary Colwell. It is tempting to idolise “wild…
“Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it” – Anne Boyer on the inspirational imperative
I posted before about the inspirational imperative, the the endless pressure to be “inspirational” as the response to stress, distress and setbacks. This passage from Anne Boyer’s New Yorker essay “What Cancer Takes…
L.M. Sacasas on accusations of romanticising the past.
At The Frailest Thing blog, L.M. Sacasas identifies something I’ve often noticed and wish there was a handy word for: Steven Pinker and Jason Hickel have recently engaged in a…
#AshWednesday with Evelyn Waugh in New Orleans, 1949
Via the Evelyn Waugh Society online I came across this from Waugh in 1949. It captures the falseness of the dichotomy betweent the fleshy pleasure of Mardi Gras and the…
“Weren’t you delighted to see such beauty as hers?” : Introducing St Pelagia the Harlot
In “Of Martyrs, Monks, and Mystics: A Yearly Meditational Reader of Ancient Spiritual Wisdom”by Charles Ringma and Irene Alexander, I came across this quote from The Life of St. Pelagia…
You are not alone: the word “sonder”
I recently came across the word “sonder” Coined in 2012 by John Koenig, whose project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, aims to come up with new words for emotions that…
Séamus Sweeney 