Just Read the Book
Well, I must say that I was surprised to find a (Collecting Thoughts Press) post from The Before Times (March 2019: remember what the world was like then?) that made me smile and made me think, Yup. Still applies. Since…
How Many Will Make It Past the Prison Walls and Never Get Locked in Again?
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside Thoughts, conversations, experiences, memories, things that I’m reading are all coming together and leading me on. For Tolstoy, the self is not a system, but an aggregate. It is a cluster of habits and…
Who Wrote that Book?
Most of my life was largely guided by unquestioned assumptions: my parents loved me, school was a good thing, following the rules was a guarantee of success. I know that my parents loved me, but the other stuff? Well, let’s…
The Emptiness of the World
Alone on the island. It certainly feels that way. Yes, that is the nature of humanity, in which we are each alone in our own bodies, experiencing the world through our individual senses. “It is ironic that the one thing…
Worming into Our Consciousness
Since I seldom seem able to go forward without shifting into reverse first, I am approaching a new post by looking at an old one—as a matter of fact, the first post here at The Ruff Draft. On August 11,…
Recognizing Limits
Leo Tostoy believed that all history is essentially false. How is it that two people can witness the same accident and give conflicting testimonies only a few minutes after it happens, with both witnesses convinced they are sharing accurate information?…
How Absolute?
Two chapters a day is my quota for War and Peace. It’s possible that I will make it more of a priority at some point, but for now, I am content with my pace and have been pleasantly surprised by…
Roughly Recognized
According to Gary Saul Morson in Hidden in Plain Sight, “In the early reviews of War and Peace, objections were raised most frequently against the plot. ‘This disordered heap of accumulated material,’ as one reviewer called it, was perceived as…
A Philosopher of the Present
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is back in my reading rotation. Along with it, I’m rereading Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace,’ by Gary Saul Morson. My pace with both books might best be…
Mom Planted Petunias
I’ve started questioning reality. Every turn around the Internet block makes me feel like I’m in the fiction stacks of my local library, where I’m picking books at random, reading a few pages, then placing each back on the shelf…
Needlework
Anyone familiar with my writings might notice a pattern (or two) in the way I think. Themes thread their way through my words, showing up as a few stitches here, wending their way beneath the surface, then popping up again…
