Giuseppe Ungaretti, “Another Night”
I want to thank everyone who has been reading and has plans to continue reading this blog. While I was wading through Ungaretti recently, it struck me that his ...
Category: philosophy
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
1 The unexamined life is not worth living does not seem true. We can be very hurt in friendships and relationships; we can fall to pieces when goals, large or s...
Susan Sontag: “No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”
I wonder how my best students make something special out of what I assign. I’m staring at an essay—the first chapter of Sontag’s Regarding the Pain ...
Plato, “Meno,” 70A-72A
I am using the Anastaplo & Berns translation. Plato’s Meno, tr. Anastaplo & Berns. Newburyport: Focus, 2004. In this lecture I want to address thr...
Notes on Craft: Francis Bacon, “Of Delays”
I want my writing in 2020 to demonstrate far more attentiveness to craft. How do writers create sentences their readers want to quote? How do they give them ima...