The entirety of life—all its purpose, beauties, majesty, tragedies, failures, weepings, stories, sciences, arts, music, loving, growth, religions, philosophies, cultures, living—can be condensed into one word: Family.
Do not be sad when you find out your original idea was perfectly articulated some thousand years before you were born; rejoice that your mind and heart and soul have connected to the same fount of knowledge and beauty as did the greats before you.
Responsibility makes a man, while lacking responsibility breaks him. The greater the responsibility the greater the man, likewise with lacking duty and necessity. Men are that they might be needed, for therein a man learns to be, and to become, and a man is a being of becoming.
Do not film your personal life, do not upload films of your personal life to the internet. There is no amount of engagement that is worth the stoop. Do not pretend to live in virtual reality.
I am constantly in awe of the world and the billions of people in it: as you read this someone dies, someone has a baby, someone kisses his girl for the first time, someone loses her mother, someone drives to the Wendys, someone travels across the Atlantic. And you read.
The mind is far from private, for we act out the thoughts and intentions of our hearts with every breath. All the world's an audience to the theater of the mind, staged for all to see by the body.
It is the moral duty of a Professor to teach in such a way that the students have no idea what the Professor’s political ideology is. If the students know based on in-class teaching alone, then that Professor is nothing more than a propagandist.
To understand truth you must first be truthful; the truth can only be received by truth, wisdom by the wise, virtue by the virtuous, love by the loving. Thus it is that “from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
@tishray
A man who does not legally (contractually) and spiritually bind himself to the woman he “loves,” he is nothing more than a boy that will never grow up.
Your phone is a functional window to the infinite—it can be used passively to see the day to day of the lowest orders of our human existence, or actively to create higher orders of knowledge, order, and love. Does your phone make of you an object, or an agent of action and power?
Language learning is a process of memory and remembering, until you encode the language into your body and soul—then it unfolds into a process of being.
Just spent 2 hours in old journals from about 10 years ago, reading of old dreams I had that now have unbelievable meaning, reading of the hopes of a young man for a future now present. Write in a journal, you and your children and their children will forever be grateful.
Borges on teaching literature. One of the fundamental problems with the humanities today is that none who teach ever practice the arts they profess to understand.
When you finish a book like this, all you can do is sit back in awe and gratitude.
“But Ivan did not answer. Alyosha stood at the crossroads under the streetlamp until Ivan disappeared completely into the darkness.”
I must read Cormac McCarthy because I must read Borges because I must read Cervantes and Shakespeare and Dante because I must read Virgil because I must read Homer because I must read the Law and the Prophets.
Every artists who is truthful will admit that the beauty they create does not come from themselves—it is a gift, a revelation, a discovering, an uncovering. The song rings from another world, the lines and colors from another realm, the narrative lived in a time before this.
Literature enacts the connection of souls—of intelligence with intelligence. The deeper you read, the more your mind expands and you begin to look for only those souls that supersede your ability to feel, express and stretch. Thus the eternal value of the classics.
Religion is the language of the body, spoken in how we dress, how we move in the world, in our rites, the use of our hands and feet, and expresses the content of our hearts. In this language we communicate to ourselves and to God who we truly are and what we are becoming.
Creativity requires a soul, to live and have lived with those who have lived, and to grow into godliness. A machine can never do this because the machine will always only be our creation. To grant it “creativity” is to negate our own creative capacity—it is a rejection of soul.
In the hand is where the soul of a person is revealed, similar to the mouth and the eyes. The hands hold the locus of most action, violence, creation, affection, toil and love. In the hand of a woman is felt her divinity, and in the hand of a man his strength.
All Art is a shard of broken glass reflecting a world beyond this one: one of eternal possibilities and infinite beauty.
Art doesn’t call you to this world, it calls you to another, something higher; why else would you consistently return to it?
Dostoevsky’s baby daughter died at three months as he penned The Idiot. He wrote “my Sonya has died, three days ago we buried her… This little three-month-old creature, so poor, so tiny, was already a person and a character for me. She was
Make of your heart and mind a book filled to overflowing with the wisdom of eternity. That book will become a seed, filled with blood and heaven’s dew. And when you lay down, that seed will spring forth to infinite shade for generations after you.
1. Don Quixote, Cervantes
2. Ficciones, Borges
3. Moby Dick, Melville
4. The Idiot, Dostoevsky
5. East of Eden, Steinbeck
6. The Lost Steps, Carpentier
7. All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy
8. Grande Sertão: Veredas, Guimarães Rosa
9. Light in August, Faulkner
10. Posthumous
Something nefarious in the fact that pop songs will glue to the mind in seconds while scripture or the works of Shakespeare take concentrated effort and dedication to memorize. We are mere objects of pop, yet agents of poetry and prophecy.
Writing is no mere exercise in data transmission, but an exercise of the soul, of soulful communication, of soul discovery, of soul development and immortality. To reduce writing to mere utility is an offense to the human race as a whole.
One of the reasons I intuitively hate ChatGPT is its erasure of personal idiolect. It’s the little sayings and mannerisms of an author which bring writing to life - lose that to a homogenised mass of dead letters and you lose the very essence of expression
Every good man is the product of refinement from a good woman, and every good woman is the product of refinement from a good man. And when they together create and foster life, both for each other and their posterity, they become a king and a queen.
Modern art seeks to be contemporary, is bound to time and will die (quickly) with time; Art never wanted anything to do with being contemporary.
This is the meaning of the meme “which way western man?” The way beyond time, or the way chained to time?
The loss of the universities will produce a God-sized hole similar to the one Nietzsche foresaw—an irreplaceable social chasm. The university once was a temple, a place in which to find community & God, and draw near to Him through truth. Now it’s a game of money and commodity.
Since
#UPS
drivers will soon be earning $170k per year, it doesn't make sense for most people to borrow huge amounts of money to spend four years in college, for starting salaries of around $50k, when they can earn over three times as much right out of high school driving trucks.
Our modern word “talent” comes from the Greek “talanton,” which meant “a balance” or “a certain weight,” referring to a sum of money (the British Pound or the Mexican Peso—peso meaning weight—are examples of weights as representing money). 🧵
You write not to share what you think, but to discover what you think. Writing makes your thoughts physical and real, and forces you to make finite the infinite stream of feeling within.
It is with great humility and honor that I now declare the winner of the Extremely Official Twitter Literary Championship, and here by declare that:
The Sultan of Soul, The Titan of Tautology, The Clarion of Clairvoyance, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is the GOAT.
There is no such thing as a “self-made” billionaire; there is no such thing as an artist’s personal inspiration. All great things stand on the shoulders of giants.
Home is where boys become men, and girls become women; where purpose and meaning in life fold onto one infinite point. Build a home, and you will find God.
I am simultaneously sad and infinitely grateful I waited until today for today. I’m really not sure why there is any debate regarding the great American novel, here it is.
Borges was denied the Nobel for being conservative. Of course the irony is that his work completely transcended politics, which is precisely what makes him Great.
Cormac McCarthy, W.B. Yeats, Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Left/Right sensibility has no bearing on whether a person will be a great artist or have empathy.
This is the paradox of reading: you must be quiet to talk, and you must be inward to learn outwardly. Book buying isn’t simply about wanting to read more, but about surrounding yourself with the spirits of the dead or the distant, now preserved in words and numbers. To buy a book
I am very happy, I visited 4 bookstores and bought 10 new books, and my unread books total 45. I don't know when I will read them, but buying books, being surrounded by books makes me very happy!
“They said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men…
It’s a reflection of our cultural health (which we don’t have). We have no words because our words have no substance, so we must use the strongest words to evoke the strongest feeling, all to show how little we have to say.
to me in consolation that I’ll have other children. But where is my Sonya? Where is this little personality for whom, I say boldly, I would accept the cross’s agony if only she might be alive?”
Responsibility is the great curse word of modernity. Everything done is done to avoid it, ignore it, eschew its gnawing call to honor and virtue. Responsibility is the call to manhood when all society wants are boys. Rise up, oh men of God, and put on the robes of responsibility.
Beauty is a judge, and you will hate her until you turn your being towards union with her. To do so requires sacrifice, a fight against entropy, and in that fight you make sacred your life, the order you formed in the face of inevitable decay, and your union with her.
7 classics to get to know me:
-The Brothers Karamazov
-Notes from the Underground
-Demons
-Master and Margarita
-The Book of Disquiet
-Metamorphosis
-The Fall (I want to say The Myth of Sisyphus but don't think so, it will be the right answer here)
His faith in Christ, found throughout his work, was not for his sins alone, but also in the promise of seeing anew his Sofya—this is clear in his portrayal of Prince Myshkin, “a positively beautiful man.” Without Christ there is no Myshkin, no Alyosha, no Zosima, no Dostoevsky.
One of the most (if not the most) beautiful portrayals of womanhood in cinema. She saves the day, twice, and never asks for recognition or favor. She is the goddess that makes a king of George in meek silent beauty. Such is holy and eternal love.
To love is to become a student of the other, observing, inquiring, memorizing, mastering the desires and needs and truth of the beloved. A joyful spouse is a studious spouse.
beginning to know me, to love, and smile when I came near. When with my comical voice I used to sing songs to her, she liked to listen to them. She didn’t cry and didn’t frown when I kissed her; she used to stop crying when I came near. And now they say
Scruton wrote that “to kiss a mouth is not to place one body part against another, but to touch the other person in his very self… a summoning of the other into the surface of his being.” 10/
In this Easter season, I wrote for my fellow lovers of Christ and Dostoevsky. As a man of sorrows himself, Dostoevsky frequently turned to Christ for strength and beauty—for it is beauty, through Christ, that will save the world.
Anything worth doing is not possible to do on your own. You need at least one person who can see in you something you’d never see in yourself. That person (most likely persons) brings it out of you as you do the same for them. There is no successful “leave me alone.”
Art seals the artist to the eternal present. Here rests Chopin’s body, but his spirit still sings the breath of life in his music.
Thus the artist, in his art, imitates God, connecting himself into the infinite.
Chopin is far from dead, you can feel his being in these songs:
A broken heart and a contrite spirit are the rarest and most valuable assets in the world today. Do all you can to acquire these treasures, for they are keys to a world beyond this.
One of the greatest blessings of my life is that I’m not that smart. So whenever a flash of insight comes to me, a window into wisdom, I can be assured that it comes from God and that He is close.
🚨 Final Round of the Extremely Official Twitter Literary Championship! 🚨
Now that everyone’s feelings are hurt, and many are mourning, we can proceed to finally determine the GOAT of Literary beauty. The Bard, or the Prophet:
Shakespeare vs Dostoevsky
My mom hand-stitched each person in the family as a Christmas present—my family is the five on the right; the smallest one on at the end is my four-year-old’s imaginary friend.
@DylanoA4
@RationalMale
Perhaps the greatest waste of energy is a man who lived but never had a son to teach, who could buy the earth but only for himself, who could lift a weight but never a stone, who had every connection for nothing at all.