Texts and Archives

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Tuesday, February 13, 2024

First Affections

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William Wordsworth,  Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood :            [...]  High instincts before which o...
Monday, February 12, 2024

So Stainless And So Calm

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George W. Bethune (1805-1862), Hymn to Night :                          YES! bear them to their rest;                     The rosy babe, tir...
Saturday, January 27, 2024

Melancholy Bird

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Charlotte Smith, Sonnet III.,  To A Nightingale:                Poor melancholy bird—that all night long                Tell’st to the Moon ...
Friday, January 5, 2024

In Yourself Encased

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Fyodor Tyutchev,  Silentium , tr. Anatoly Liberman (in his On the Heights of Creation ):                     Speak not, lie deep, do not rev...
Saturday, December 16, 2023

Unseen, Unknown

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Alexander Pope, Ode to Solitude :                     Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,                     Thus unlamented let me die,    ...
Thursday, September 21, 2023

Only True Glory

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Giacomo Leopardi, Letters , letter to Pietro Giordani (Recanati, 21st November 1817; tr. Prue Shaw): . . . love glory: but, first, only true...
Sunday, September 17, 2023

The Lonely Road

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Lermontov, Alone I Pass Along the Lonely Road  (tr. John Pollen):                Alone I pass along the lonely road,                Thro’ ga...
Friday, September 15, 2023

Ancient Way Of Philosophising

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Georginna Anne Hinnebusch, A Philosophy to Live by: Goethe's Art of Living in the Spirit of the Ancients , (The University of Chicago Pr...
Saturday, September 2, 2023

History, Autobiography, Self-Reflection, And Fantasia

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Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences  (Selected Works, Volume III), edt. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frit...
Thursday, August 31, 2023

From The Barbarism Of The Savage To The Barbarism Of Decay

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Giambattista Vico, The New Science , tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (New York: Cornell University Press, 1948), Conclusion o...
Saturday, August 26, 2023

To Philosophise

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Immanuel Kant, Introduction to Logic , tr. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London, 1885), p. 16: Two things, chiefly, are required in a philosopher...
Thursday, August 24, 2023

A Lot Of Numskulls

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Paul Hazard,  European Thought in the eighteenth Century: from Montesquieu to Lessing , tr. J. Lewis May (Yale University Press, 1954), p. 8...
Monday, July 31, 2023

Love

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1 Corinthians 13:4-7:                     4 Love suffereth long: it is bountiful: love envieth not: love doth not boast itself: it is not p...
Saturday, July 29, 2023

A Theory For Everything

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Lucian Blaga, Lucian Blaga: Selected Philosophical Extracts (Vernon Press, 2018), Aphorisms, p. 147: Those who in order to live need a theor...
Monday, July 24, 2023

Making Knowledge One's Own

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Michel de Montaigne, Essays , bk. I., ch. 24, Of Pedantry (tr. Charles Cotton): We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; w...
Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Love's Greatest Gift

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László F. Földényi,  Melancholy (Melankólia) , tr. Tim Wilkinson (Yale University Press, 2016), ch. 7, Love and Melancholia, pp. 245-246: Lo...
Monday, July 10, 2023

A World That Makes You Recoil

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Giacomo Leopardi, The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi 1817-1837 , tr. Prue Shaw (Routledge, 2017), from the 3rd letter, To Pietro Giordani, Mila...
Thursday, July 6, 2023

Misanthropic & Romantic Pessimism

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Georges Léon Palante,  Pessimisme et Individualisme  (Paris, Alcan, 1914), tr. Mitch Abidor: The foolishness that this [misanthropic] pessim...

Goethe And The Joy Of Living

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Pierre Hadot, Don't Forget to Live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises , tr. Michael Chase (The University of Chicago Press...
Monday, July 3, 2023

Between Senancour And Amiel, The Malady Of The Century, & The Romanticists

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Étienne Pivert de Senancour,  Obermann, Selections From Letters to a Friend , tr. Jessie Peabody Frothingham (Cambridge, 1901), vol. I., Int...