Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Literary Matters

  • Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

    At any given time I am  reading twenty or so books.  One of them at the moment is Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012.  In the midst of a lot of stuff, there are some gems.  Here is one: Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is…

  • Journal Notes on Ed Abbey from May 1997

    I purchased Edward Abbey’s posthumous collection of journal extracts entitled Confessions of a Barbarian (ed. Petersen, Little, Brown & Co., 1994) in April of 1997. Here are some journal jottings inspired by it. From the notebooks of Paul Brunton to the journals of Ed Abbey – from one world to another. Each of us inhabits…

  • John Gardner on Mickelsson’s Ghosts

    John Gardner describes his novel, Mickelsson's Ghosts: The novel is about a famous philosopher who, midway through his career, suddenly finds himself (as Dante did) lost. He feels he has failed his wife and family (the wife has left him), feels he has betrayed his earlier promise and the values of his Wisconsin Lutheran background,…

  • Zuckerman Unbound

    Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 58: All in all, being without any need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation and conflict and pointlessness and disgust that, as a person ages, can render less than desirable the manifold relations that make for a rich, full life. I stayed…

  • Milton Praises the Strenuous Life

    Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice,"  he quotes Milton:      I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and     unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but     slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run     for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we…

  • A Little Nugget from Martial

    There have always been serious writers and there have always been low-rent scribblers. You should not imagine that it was any different in the ancient world.  Here is a little something from Martial. Cui legisse satis non est epigrammata centum,nil illi satis est, Caediciane, mali.   Caedicianus, if my readerAfter a hundred epigrams stillWants more, then…

  • Literal or Antiphrastic?

    Elliot writes, When I began to read your “Who doesn't need philosophy?” post, I immediately started to think of reasons why adherents of religious and nonreligious worldviews need philosophy as inquiry. Indeed, one can think of many good reasons why such adherents (especially the dogmatic ones) need philosophy. However, as I continued to read, I…

  • Blanshard on Santayana’s Prose Style

    Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphasis added.   The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused toadopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To…

  • On Aphorisms, Aphoristically

    A good aphorism is the tip of an iceberg of thought. One gets the point but is spared the substantiation.

  • David Horowitz

    In this video clip, Horowitz gets a Muslim Jew-hater to show her true colors. Here he is on the Dennis Prager show discussing his new book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next.

  • Flannery O’Connor on the Beats and Their Lack of Discipline

    Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959: I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them. …

  • Joyce Johnson Remembers Kerouac

    Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published 54 years ago in September, 1957. Joyce Johnson remembers. Excerpts:      Who could have predicted that an essentially plotless novel about     the relationship between two rootless young men who seemed     constitutionally unable to settle down was about to kick off a     culture war that is still being fought to this day?…

  • Some Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran with Commentary

    How to disentangle profundity from puffery in any obscure formulation? Clear thought stops short, a victim of its own probity; the other kind, vague and indecisive, extends into the distance and escapes by its suspect but unassailable mystery. (131)   Excellent except perhaps for ‘victim,’ which betrays Cioran’s mannered negativism. Substitute ‘beneficiary’ and the thought’s…

  • Vanity and Shamelessness?

     From the pen of E. M. Cioran:      Indolence saves us from prolixity and thereby from the shamelessness inherent in production. The aphorism is from Drawn and Quartered.  Is all production vain and shameless? Perhaps not if one keeps one's productions to oneself. But writing books, articles and blog posts is not just production, but…

  • Pushing Outwards Toward the Limits of Mystery

    Flannery O'Connor, "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction" in Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 40-42: All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality. Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding…