And So They Departed...

Merry Christmas!

The Feast Of Fools

Came early this year.

Blue Maqams

Shebi Arus!

Imam Of The Ironists

That Time Of Year Again

This is that time of year when we remember a Palestinian mother who was forced to give birth in a stable because the only decent place to stay in town was occupied, like her country.

The Boy In The Blue Khirqa

Approximations Of Immortality

That which is oldest and best within us is "the ingenuity [of which] human beings are capable...[for] circumventing and subverting even the most elaborate control system." [See Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 134].

The extent to which we exercise our freedom--the "negative freedom"--to resist, refuse, renounce social determinism, is the extent to which we elevate our mortal lives and approximate immortality.

The Unmoved Mover exists; It exists within.

"...is any one capable of rising above fortune unless he has help from God? He it is that prompts us to noble and exalted endeavors. In each and every good man 'a god (what god we are uncertain) dwells.'"

~ Seneca, Letters To Lucilius, XLI.

Your Solitary Self

Your solitary self's deepest desire is for survival, whether in the here and now, or transcendentally elsewhere. To be augmented by the genius of others is to enhance the possibilities of survival, at least in the present and the near future.

~ Harold Bloom, Genius, 5.

The Emersonian Genius

That which is oldest and best within us does not die.



It cannot die because it was never born.

Ironist And Romantic, Part Deux

Still one of the finest appreciations of Bob Dylan ever published.

Ironist And Romantic

Reading Rorty and Cavell.

More Emersonia

Emerson and Self-Culture.

Emerson and Islam.

From Puritanism To Transcendentalism

Emerson and tasawwuf.

Lives Of The Poets

Emerson And Persian Poetry

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO – Encyclopaedia Iranica