Category: meditation

• November 29, 2011

  Gladwell’s 10,000 rule for success and Aristotle’s reply

  So a wise guy goes up to Malcolm Gladwell and asks him, “Hey, bub, can you tell me how you get to Carnegie Hall?” Gladwell, seeing that the guy’s probably in his early 60s, doesn’t miss a beat: “Of course. From here, you just take the N/Q/R to 57th St. and then walk a block…
• November 25, 2011

  On murmuring, bad authority, and the abdication of responsibility

  Murmuring and the Articulation of a Grievance Over the past week, I have been discussing the nature of good authority, the education of those expressing disquietude, and the challenges posed by individuals dissatisfied with the habitual exercise of institutional power. I suggested that, far from being byzantine or draconian, St. Benedict’s conception of murmuring was…
• November 23, 2011

  On murmuring, education, and love

  The Ancients Versus the Moderns The question we ask of power has changed tremendously. For the ancients, the principal question was, “Who rules? Who is fit to rule? What makes someone a wise ruler?” Their assumption was that the wise ruler would (or could) do no harm. You can see in Plato’s fantasy of a…
• November 19, 2011

  ‘We don’t need the big voice’

  Beware of the big voice. So writes Martin Amis in his New Yorker review of Don DeLillo’s recently released collection of short stories, The Angela Esmerelda: Nine Stories. In “Laureate of Terror: Don DeLillo’s Prophetic Soul,” Amis relates, [W]hen a twelve-year-old, Esmerelda, is raped and thrown off a roof, her image “miraculously” appears on a nearby “billboard…
• November 16, 2011

  On blurbs and encomia

  Had my encomium been turned into a blurb? On Sunday, I’d received a nice note in my inbox to the effect that the first issue of the Journal of Modern Wisdom had been selling at a good clip at the local book shops in Cambridge. A few weeks prior, I’d sent a favorable review of JMW…