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Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” is about the fences that divide us, both externally and internally.Property and territoriality being a metaphor for that toxic blend of materialism and inner turmoil.Jean Renoir’s 1937 classic La Grande Illusion was also about dividing lines and the existential struggle within; the riddle of humanism that humankind cannot seem [...]
There’s an epidemic Stirring passions in young hearts Even the old campaigners Have got it really bad Well we ain’t seen nothing like it Since coronation day But when the street parties sound I’m going underground To keep the rabid hounds at bay Oh my my this war dance A patriotic romance No we ain’t [...]
Pick your protest.Is this wave of political activism, from Black Bloc to Tea Party different from past manifestations? Every era has unique twists, but they are each not as different as you may think. This time it’s different?… Natalie Zemon Davis: I define tradition as ways of thinking, doing, and feeling that a social group [...]
Believers and Deceivers. The findings have surfaced with ominous regularity over the last few years, and with little notice: Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change [...]
It was the world of Saint-Simon. In his insultingly tiny Versailles room a noble diarist recorded life in the court of the Sun King. Prudery, malice, and consideration of status filled his pages and produced a masterpiece that recorded the tragedy of Louis XIV’s declining years… Only a hard , tough blinkered egoist could have [...]
“At the very beginning of the long dialogue between thinkers that makes up western political theory there is Plato’s Republic, and at the very beginning of the Republic there is this strange and interesting exchange. Socrates asks an old man, Cephalus, if he can define justice. Cephalus says, Of course, justice means to tell the [...]
The mad person as a symbol is a living, breathing reproach to the skeptical, scientific view of humanity and the universe which underlies everything that used to be known as Progress. The mad person as metaphor is also the one who opens the trap door to that nether world where fiction and reality have a [...]
It is about creating moments of recognition. Almost a delicious and delightful sense of reverse-traumatism. Anti-traumatism. Flying so far gone, its actually earth bound illusion. Barbara Kruger as a detonator of some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience; a dealing, a confrontation with the complexities of power and social life, that in terms [...]
“I would say that our patients never really despair because of any suffering in itself! Instead, their despair stems in each instance from a doubt as to whether suffering is meaningful. Man is ready and willing to shoulder any suffering as soon and as long as he can see a meaning in it.” …”What gives [...]
“But in the anxiety of the second half of the eighteenth century, the fear of madness grew at the same time as the dread of unreason: and thereby the two forms of obsession, leaning upon each other, continued to reinforce each other. And at the very moment we note the liberation of the iconographic powers that accompany unreason, [...]
