Category: Alain
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Alain on Keeping to the Present
Substack invited me to re-post this from a year ago. For an old man, a year is nothing; for you young whippersnappers, an ice age. So that's my excuse.
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Alain on Keeping to the Present
Substack latest.
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Thought, Prayer, Meditation
"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain…
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Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order
The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll…
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Acting With Others Versus Talking With Others
An excellent insight from Alain’s essay, “The Ills of Others”: To act with others is always good; to talk with others for the sake of talking, complaining, and recriminating, is one of the greatest scourges on earth . . . . (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, p. 160) I once built a small dock…
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Alain on Keeping to the Present
Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier’s sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym ‘Alain,’ Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a philosoblogger.…