”When he wriggles,” Ambrose Bierce once wrote of the politician, “he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice.” Bierce might well have said the same about modem writers who cannot distinguish between propaganda and art or between political sermons and poetry. Within the last year college bulletin boards and newspapers...
Matthew Bruccoli is, perhaps, the leading biographer of modern American novelists. With this book he scores something of a triple, as it appeared soon after his acclaimed lives of Fitzgerald and O’Hara. Like his other works, it is exceptionally well-produced. It is a handsome book, with a full apparatus of notes and documents. There is...
Hillman writes of “the governance of the gods.” It is morenreasonable to assume that both men are attracted to the Buddhistnconcept, according to which there is no self, only a flux ofnsensations cut up into discrete and illusionary consciousnesses.nThis view was shared by philosophers from Heraclitus to Nietzsche,nand it has had decisive influence on devotees...
One of the best things about most of America’s past Presidential elections is that they have really decided so little. A remarkably centrist cultural and social consensus has dictated that, despite all of the vehement campaign rhetoric, both major parties have usually agreed on a wide range of fundamental issues. This national consensus has often...
Most people know nothing about metaphysics and wish to know less. The case is not that they do not actually govern their lives in harmony with a set of metaphysical principles, for that is simply not an option. As Aldous Huxley perceived: “It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given...