Have you ever read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem Insomnia? I saw it on twitter the other day and it blew my little mind. Take the whole thing in, enjoy all the turns: The moon in the bureau mirrorlooks out a million miles(and perhaps with pride, at herself,but she never, never smiles)far and away beyond sleep, orperhaps …
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Pre-Learning
When I picked a major my second semester of college, I could describe what I was going to learn. I didn’t actually know any of it yet, but the major gave clear language about what it was going to teach. Mine was a particularly strong case because there was a sequence of required classes for …
Leonardo da Vinci by Sigmund Freud
I picked up my copy of “Leonardo” on one of my first days in India, at Midland Bookshop, in between my guesthouse and office. Midland is small but densely stuffed with books. I eventually became a regular. On that first trip I grabbed the very small Freud book I’d never heard of and paid about …
Rereading
I suspect there’s a lot of value in reading something, taking notes, and coming back in a couple months. I just did that with Abelard’s Ethical Writings. The first time, I was trying to parse out exactly what he meant by “will” and “consent” and predict each logical turn. The second time it was easier …
Current Reading
As of now, I’m partway through: Essays in Indian History – Irfan Habib An underrated Marxist economic historian The Islamic Enlightenment – Christopher de Bellaigue Honestly, I thought this was going to be about, like, al-Farabi. It’s not; it’s about the development of modern nation-states in the Islamic world in the 19th century. It’s popular …
Mather on Books 