Heraclitus, hermit

The divergence of Eastern and Western philosophy came to be expressed in the relationship of individual and state. This relationship is a more reliable measure ...

Winter thoughts

Green kale is an attractive and nutritious vegetable, growing to a couple feet tall, useful in every kitchen garden. Towards the end of fall, the gardener shoul...

Spengler’s hermits

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) considered historiography as a morphology, like the biologist studying an organism, from birth to maturation to eventual decline and...

Swedenborg’s hermit

One of the more colorful theological figures of the eighteenth century is Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). In an era of rationalism and the exhaustion of wars of...

Solitude survey

A series of related items on the topic of solitude is presented in the blog of Psychology Today. The chief article is titled “Motivations for Solitude Exp...

Metaphors

In their classic book Metaphors We Live By (2003), the scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson sought to demonstrate that most human speech is expressed as meta...

Nietzsche’s madman

When Nietzsche announces the death of God – through the persona of Zarathustra and the madman in the marketplace – his statement is not a theological one but a ...

The eternal loop

An article writer in a past issue of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle described his personal interests, how little they intersected with worldly concerns, and ask...

Yugen and poignancy

Wabi and sabi are familiar concepts of Japanese aesthetics in part because they are readily applied to objects of art, therefore tangible, observable, providing...

Introvert well-being

Some years ago, a Wall Street Journal article argued that introverts are happier when acting or behaving like extroverts, who, the article maintained, are happi...