classics digests, reflections and reviews
The COVID-19 pandemic and government lockdown have turned my leisure reading to old -almost a century old- science fiction/dystopian/horror novels, such as The Island of Doctor Moreau, Dracula and 1984. Looking back, I noticed a pattern in my choices: all these novels make references to religion and God, and the destiny of man, both as an individual and as a species. Like Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World is often […]
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Brave New World is a first-class essay written as a third-class novel. It is intellectually stimulating, but emotionally and imaginatively barren, not to mention spiritually uninspiring — curiously similar to the world it envisions. I had known about it for a long time, but had not read it firsthand, and would probably never read it, if the philosopher Dr. Peter Kreeft hadn’t recommended it as one of twenty-six books people […]
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Perhaps because I read Crime and Punishment after Brothers Karamazov, viz. in the reverse order in which Dostoevsky wrote them, I find the former psychologically more coherent, more relatable, than the latter, but philosophically less thought-provoking. It is almost as if Dostoevsky is working things out through his writings. When one reads them in the reverse order, like reading the end of a mystery novel first, the element of wonder is […]
Read moreLove Inspires How can my Muse want subject to invent While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse Thine own sweet argument, too excellent For every vulgar paper to rehearse? O, give thyself the thanks if aught in me Worthy perusal stand against thy sight, For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee, When thou thyself dost give invention light? Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more […]
Read moreFor the Down-and-Out When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d, Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts […]
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To be, or not to be, it matters not. To Shakespeare, the world is a stage, so the relationship between the play and the actor is akin to that between Life and man. He introduces a play within a play in Hamlet, in order that the theatre audience may recognize the similarity. As a character, Hamlet is almost paralyzed, like a bad actor who is incapable of enacting the art […]
Read moreConciseness has always seemed to me to be the most essential problem in art. To fit his destiny to a man so nicely as to leave no vacuum, to inclose him as radiantly as the ember does the fly and yet the while preserve every detail of his being has, of all tasks, ever been the dearest to me. –Stefan Zweig Stefan Zweig was an Austrian journalist and playwright, with […]
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