I Taught Myself To Live Simply – Anna Akhmatova
I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the…
Category: time passes
From “The State”, a short story by Tommy Orange
From The New Yorker, drawn from Orange’s forthcoming novel There There Before you were born, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool—a swimmer. You were a…
The value judgments of scientific acceptance rules
From “A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities”, Roy Sorensen: When I joined the philosophy department at Washington University in St Louis, I was pleased to see a room with the plaque:…
Review of “The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, The Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity”, Amir D Aczel, Lancet, 17th February 2001
Following on from a review of a book on Nabokov on butterflies, my second piece in a proper non-student publication was this review of Amir D Aczel’s book on George…
Review of Oliver Sacks, “The River of Consciousness”, TLS 13th March 2018
Originally posted on A Medical Education:
I have a review in the current TLS of Oliver Sacks’ essay collection, “The River of Consciousness” . The full article is subscriber only…
St Patrick’s Breastplate / The Deer’s Cry : music by Shaun Davey / Rita Connolly, Arvo Part, John Fahey, John Kenny, Melville Cook
As a child, I was somewhat mystified why a certain hymn in our religion books was called “St Patrick’s Breastplate” but went: Christ be beside me, Christ be before me,…
Poetry is Beauty’s Voice
Originally posted on Signs of Life:
“Words and measures do not give life; they merely symbolize it” (Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity 48). For any kind of beauty there…
“Biography is a thoroughly reprehensible genre”
Only a few days after I made a rather grumpy comment on the quality of the Spectator now, comes this piece by Roger Lewis on the dodginess of biography. Lewis…
Séamus Sweeney 