Welcome to Litsy!

“You have to love…You have to feel. It‘s the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart…to be swallowed up. And when…you are broken, betrayed, left, hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree,listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.” -LOUISE ERDRICH, The Painted Drum

The above books I lovingly call my Library of Grace

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another...“

https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-toni-morrison-racism-...

Thank you vibe check for bringing this to my attention!

So good! Especially liked the tennis biography review and the host, about right wing talk radio. Just as resonant now as when they were written 25 years ago.

'There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.'

...what we ordinarily call friends & friendships are nothing but acquaintanceships...in the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them...If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.

(from "Of friendship", Book I, Essay 28)

#coffeeandabook #montaigne #essays #classics

Essays on feminism, and a little bit of needed hope. 4.75⭐️

I love a good, world-view-expanding book of essays, and this is one that I can't believe I haven't picked up yet. Every time I finish an essay, I go listen to the album or artist he wrote about.

reread this because I‘m taking a class and compiling an essay collection. Just as fantastic and compelling as it was the first time.

Life can be painful, confusing. Finding your own way & your own place in this life, with a million distractions promising enlightenment, and a million more promising escape. I think The Essays are slowly becoming a refuge for me - not to blindly accept what he says, but as a conversation. His essays are steeped in study & experience. Reading Montaigne, although it takes work, I'm finding that I can - and should - be my own captain in rough waters.

I found the essays written when Rothfeld loves a thing (pasta, Melville, David Cronenberg‘s horror films, the comedies of remarriage from the 1930‘s & 40‘s, erotic sex with her partner) way more pleasurable than those when she writes about her hatred for a thing (minimalism, fragment novels, mindfulness). This is funny because Rothfeld herself draws attention to “the pleasure of hating,” a term coined by 19th century essayist William Hazlitt.👇🏻