1.) Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle (Ancient Greek - English ( Read more... )

The Possessed (The Demons) Fyodor Dostoevsky The Old Patagonian Express Paul Theroux Ezra Pound: Early Writings. Poems and Prose ed. Ira B. Nadel The Decay of the Angel Yukio Mishima Falling Man Don DeLillo Silence Shusaku Endo Journey by Moonlight Antal Szerb W.B. Yeats: Selected ( Read more... )

"We were that generation called 'silent,' but we were silent neither, as some though, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while ( Read more... )

We drove through rolling droves of pocket-sized mountains, scrubby but still filled with a yellow-green vitality, not so arid and brown as Andalucia. Around the highway you could see whitewashed houses with tile roofs connected to the country roads by dust tire tracks ( Read more... )

"The girls Buddy brings around are a good lesson to Harry in the limits of being single -- hard little secretaries and restaurant hostesses, witchy-looking former flower children with grizzled ponytails and flat chests full of Navajo jewelry, overweight assistant heads of personnel in one of those grim new windowless office buildings a block back ( Read more... )

1) The Wind Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami ( Read more... )

Paris
This was a French film I saw in the V.O. with Spanish subtitles. In a way it was kind of sappy and hackneyed (young man thinks he is going to die and newly appreciates life) but it was actually good. It doesn't always do the obvious thing. There was some interesting ambiguity left regarding the main character. The trailer is here but I have ( Read more... )

Yesterday I realized that I turned in a statement for a scholarship application that ended in the middle of a sentence. It's pretty comical because the omission totally leaves you hanging. It's like "I am sure that this experience will help me to" and then just ends. Well, pretty embarrassing ( Read more... )

Voegelin states that "the structure of history is empirically nonapocalyptic." There is no escape from the metaxy (the permanent structure of existence) in history. Humans are forced to confront the challenge of attuning their souls to the transcendent. Spiritually indolent individuals, those whose souls are not "ordered by faith," look for ways ( Read more... )

I wasn't sure whether I liked Mishima's Confessions of a Mask at first, but the second half was excellent.

This passage, about factories working for the Japanese war effort, was pretty good:

This great factory operated upon a mysterious system of production costs: taking no account of the economic dictum that capital investment should produce a ( Read more... )