“Art is the proper task of life.” Friedrich Nietzsche I love making things. I always have. I remember as a youngster spending hours drawing pictures of Spider-Man and Dragonball Z characters. As a kid I also played piano (a skill I hope to reclaim) and more recently, I dabble in acoustic guitar. In college I [...]
On the crowded subway trains in South Korea, it can be challenging to spot a single individual (Where’s Waldo?) not engulfed-via-smartphone in the world of the Internet. At the Korean elementary school where I work, a persistent problem I face is how to get the kids to put away their phones (a sixth grader once [...]
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” ― Jack Kerouac “Travel abroad!” seems to be a nearly omnipresent meme [...]
“There was once a stonecutter who was dissatisfied with himself and with his position in life . . .” Recently, I read a book called The Tao of Pooh. This charming little book is centered on the premise that one can understand the fundamentals of Taoism through a close reading of Winnie the Pooh, the classic children’s book [...]
“When you feel happy, really happy, it somehow seems that you’ve always been happy and that you’ll always be happy. The same is often true when you feel sad, or lonely, or depressed, or broke, or sick, or scared. Something, perhaps, to remember.” A couple of weeks ago I had a sudden and sort of inexplicable [...]
“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there—and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.” The “Beat Generation” is a term used to refer to a group of post-World [...]
“Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast…a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it.” I first heard of Edward Abbey when I met a rather raffish [...]
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the Gods made for fun.” The sentiment that “life should not be taken too seriously” is a sort of dry, crusty sponge of a cliché—a statement that seems to have had every drop of nourishing value squeezed from it after ten trillion uses. And yet like so many [...]
“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.” Terence McKenna is one of those cult-famous, societal-fringe figures of whom the majority of people have never heard. He’s also someone whose views probably have a polarizing effect on anyone who encounters them. At the [...]
“That feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery. Nobody talks about it as such, though.” The term “genius” is tossed around a lot, but most would agree that the late David Foster Wallace was worthy of the title. Wallace was a novelist, essayist, and short [...]