Texts and Archives

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Monday, October 12, 2026

Technocracy vs. A Tool-Using Culture

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Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology  (New York & Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993), 28: Nonetheless, after one ...
Saturday, October 10, 2026

Ignorance Of The Miseries Of Life; Life Made Too Easy; Worth Of Earthly Pleasures; Weltschmerz; Renunciation Of Life; & Living Over Knowing

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Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Worship of Life,’’ in The Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: The Norton Library, 1936), 108-111: The obsession with life i...

The Evil Of Our Times, Permanent Adolescence, Slogans, & The Glorification Of Youth

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Johan Huizinga, ‘‘Puerlism,’’ in The Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: The Norton Library, 1936), 177-182: The most fundamental characteristic ...
Thursday, October 8, 2026

After All You Must Die

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Erasmus, ‘‘The Abbot and the Learned Lady,’’ Colloquies (tr. Craig R. Thompson): Learning costs immense toil, and after all you must die. S...
Monday, October 5, 2026

Truth Bitter & Unpleasant

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Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 11.1-2 (tr. J. W. Cohoon): [1] I am almost certain that while all men are hard to teach, they are easy to deceiv...
Friday, October 2, 2026

Modern Anti-Intellectualism

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Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Disavowal of the Intellectual Principle,’’ in The Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: The Norton Library, 1936), 102-104: Ha...
Thursday, October 1, 2026

Tasting Life’s And Love’s Bliss & Pain

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Winthrop H. Root, in his Introduction to: Poems and Letters of Nikolaus Lenau (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964), 59-60: Bear...
Saturday, September 26, 2026

Reminescences Of The Former Paradise

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Anonymous (A Lover of Flowers),  The Lover’s Language of Flowers; Expressive of the Sentiments of the Heart  (London: W. Nicholson & Son...
Friday, September 25, 2026

Human Hearts Can Never Stay

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Winthrop H. Root, in his Introduction to: Poems and Letters of Nikolaus Lenau (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964), 39-41: Lena...
Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Women Being Relatively Uncivilized

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H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1922), II., 12. Honor, 51-2: Perhaps one of the chief...
Saturday, September 19, 2026

Bitterness On The Lips

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Paolo Mantegazza, The Book of Love (New York: American-Neo-latin Library, 1917), ch. XVII, The Hell of Love, 191-92: Neither the most patie...

The Gods Taught Us Silence

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Plutarch, ‘‘Of Garrulity, or Talkativeness,’’ tr. John Philips (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies , Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 19...
Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Giving Life To Things

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From my Own Life , tr. John Oxenford, bks. I-XX (London: George B...
Monday, September 14, 2026

Faithful And Silent Priests Of The Vanished God

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Paolo Mantegazza, The Book of Love  (New York: American-Neo-latin Library, 1917), ch. XVII, The Hell of Love, 186-189: Pain, so rich in affl...

The World Of Manly Business

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Josiah Royce, ‘‘Tennyson and Pessimism,’’ in  Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New Yor...
Friday, September 11, 2026

Suffering From The Unrealised Ideal

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Jean-Marie Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction , tr. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, 1898), 190-1: Although the elem...

Alone In The Company Of Many

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Ramon Llull,   The Book of the Lover and the Beloved , tr. E. Allison Peers (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923), §§228...

Arise!

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John Milton, Paradise Lost , 1.330: Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n.
Tuesday, September 8, 2026

A Piece Of The Sun’s Gold

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Maria von Wedemeyer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pätzig, 23 August, 1943 (in Love Letters from Cell 92 , tr. John Brownjohn (Nashville: Abingdon ...
Sunday, September 6, 2026

The Pretense Of Vice; Sentimentalism & The Passionate; The Aristocratic vs. The Populace; Romanticised Biography; History & Literature; & Heroic Sincerity

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Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Task of Cultural History (1926 [1929]),’’ in The Course of Civilizations , tr. James S. Holmes & Hans van Marie (P...