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Nietzsche regarded 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' as his most important work, and his story of the wandering Zarathustra has had enormous …
This volume presents Nietzsche's remarkable collection of almost 1400 aphorisms in R. J. Hollingdale's distinguished translation, together with a new …
The Birth of Tragedy is one of the seminal philosophical works of the modern period. The theories developed in this …
The four early essays in Untimely Meditations are key documents for understanding the development of Nietzsche's thought and clearly anticipate …
Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian …
The Italian version, the masculine alter-ego, of the feminine The Makioka Sisters. Tremendously different in style: rich, overwhelming, melancholic, deep, dusty, with a sense of gloom, grand, magnificent, but similar in spirit. This is an easier read than The Makioka Sisters for those more accustomed to the European way of writings, the Romantic, the somehow Art Nouveau style of expression. Nostalgic, asymmetric, with whiplashes twisting, tangling, spiraling, stark and strong like vintage cognac.
Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching …
Junichirō Tanizaki’s magisterial evocation of a proud Osaka family in decline during the years immediately …
It may seem bizarre to compare the novel with Greek tragedies, but there's still a vestige of analogy, though in its core Buddhist. There's no melancholy, but still a strong feeling of loss. Life goes on, and on, and on, as river flows, in its course stirring eddies and waves, finally into the sea to perish. Some fade away in the course, prematurely; eddies stir and vanish without leaving a trace. Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, now green in youth, now withering on the ground; so generations in their course decay; so flourish these, when those are pass'd away. Sunset is lingering, taints every corner of the Kansai region, dyed in an elegiac golden redness, but over this red sunset, still, a sky of watery blue and the fresh scent of spring, the shivering of cherry blossoms. Every ritual and every miniscule details are that …
It may seem bizarre to compare the novel with Greek tragedies, but there's still a vestige of analogy, though in its core Buddhist. There's no melancholy, but still a strong feeling of loss. Life goes on, and on, and on, as river flows, in its course stirring eddies and waves, finally into the sea to perish. Some fade away in the course, prematurely; eddies stir and vanish without leaving a trace. Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, now green in youth, now withering on the ground; so generations in their course decay; so flourish these, when those are pass'd away. Sunset is lingering, taints every corner of the Kansai region, dyed in an elegiac golden redness, but over this red sunset, still, a sky of watery blue and the fresh scent of spring, the shivering of cherry blossoms. Every ritual and every miniscule details are that of death but yet also that of life, so frail, so precious, so destined to death and decay, but eternal for what it leaves: the memories of time.
This almost Mozartian intensity is hard to detect, but once it's felt, it lives on. What is to come is the great war and grave hardship, and the total annihilation of this old way of living, this aristocratic elegance, and the patience, the frail but beautiful rituals of life that is permeated by a premonition of death. But still, how splendid, and how graceful is the sunset, in its stubborn April fragrance, and the perseverance of frail human life.
Junichirō Tanizaki’s magisterial evocation of a proud Osaka family in decline during the years immediately before World War II is …
One of the most influential and celebrated German works of the 20th century has been newly rendered in English by …
James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting …
James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting …
The fifteen papers in this volume explore how human beliefs have been externalised and `stored' in material form, thus making …
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim sets himself the task of discovering the enduring source of …
Stimulating and often startling discussions between three friends, all highly original thinkers: Rupert Sheldrake, controversial biologist, Terence McKenna, psychedelic visionary, …
Stimulating and often startling discussions between three friends, all highly original thinkers: Rupert Sheldrake, controversial …
While these are cranks and fringe theorists, they're not stupid. Rupert Sheldrake is very much a crank who is devoted to developing a superficial theosophy-like (not that it is theosophy but it has some family resemblance to theosophy) cosmology that has no explanatory power over anything whatsoever but how his mind works is still an interesting thing to ponder upon. Terence McKenna got some strange ideas but is overall philosophical and (strangely) deep. Ralph Abraham is modest and not-that-Crankish. Reading conversations like this awakens people from the "dogmatic slumber" that they're embedded into, and from the rather filmsy reasoning it is still possible to observe a kind of possibility that they might be right in some regard. And, moreover, the conversation shows that these cranks are actually brilliant minds. One thing I don't like about New-Age stuff is, though, since they're American, their aesthetic choice is so poor that one …
While these are cranks and fringe theorists, they're not stupid. Rupert Sheldrake is very much a crank who is devoted to developing a superficial theosophy-like (not that it is theosophy but it has some family resemblance to theosophy) cosmology that has no explanatory power over anything whatsoever but how his mind works is still an interesting thing to ponder upon. Terence McKenna got some strange ideas but is overall philosophical and (strangely) deep. Ralph Abraham is modest and not-that-Crankish. Reading conversations like this awakens people from the "dogmatic slumber" that they're embedded into, and from the rather filmsy reasoning it is still possible to observe a kind of possibility that they might be right in some regard. And, moreover, the conversation shows that these cranks are actually brilliant minds. One thing I don't like about New-Age stuff is, though, since they're American, their aesthetic choice is so poor that one cannot really take them seriously without some actual effort.
