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My Summer With Montaigne
A few years ago I fell into the habit of devoting a summer season to reading a specific writer, or genre. It was not intentional, it just evolved that way. This summer is no different, well, slightly different. Ten years ago I read Proust for the first time. Six of the seven volumes of À Continue reading
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Book Review: “How to Live, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts to Answer” by Sarah Bakewell
I was first introduced to Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592) about thirty years ago. I was in graduate school. I don’t remember the class, nor the other required readings. But I remember Montaigne. I eventually dropped out of graduate school, but Montaigne stayed with me. It was, perhaps, and I honestly mean this, the most Continue reading
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“It is a question of understanding my destiny.”
The quote above is lifted from an entry in Kierkegaard’s journal. Here’s the fragment I jotted down in my notebook: “What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know….It is a question of understanding my destiny.” (Journals & Notebooks, vol. 1, p22.) It was the Continue reading
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The Grand Canyon and other philosophies
I’ve been engaged the last couple years in correspondence with a young man in prison. He is a family friend who made a bad decision. He has a bent for big ideas so naturally the two of us have had a great deal to talk about. We had a recent exchange, a portion of which Continue reading
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“What does your spiritual life look like?”
“Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?” ~ Henry David Thoreau A couple weeks ago while sitting quietly in contemplation overlooking an alpine lake a woman approached and asked, “What does your spiritual life look like?” There were a few utterances between us leading up to this most personal—and frankly, interesting—question. Continue reading
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Toward Wisdom #3
Toward Wisdom is a series of thoughts in the age of Covid-19 * * * The last words of the Buddha were recorded to be: “Things fall apart; tread the path with care.” Siddhartha Gautama was born around 480 BCE. He wasn’t called the Buddha until a couple centuries later. It means The Awakened One. Continue reading
About doug
You might say that I’m philosopher in the classical sense, that is, “One who loves knowledge.” That sounds awfully pretentious, but I don’t know how else to put it. I’ve spent my life chasing questions, diving into wisdom traditions ancient and modern, including the philosophical schools of Existentialism, Pragmatism, and the ancient Greeks, as well as several of the Eastern traditions, principally Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Admittedly, I’m no expert on anything, just a curious pilgrim.
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Doug’s writings elsewhere:
...the house I live in... 