miniZibaldone

Night by Elie Wiesel Preface to the New Translation IF IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night , including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind? Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, to help prevent history from repeating itself? Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one's knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature? There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don't k...

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” The most common response I have received to The Road Less Traveled in letters from readers has been one of gratitude for my courage, not for saying anything new, but for writing about the kind of things they had been thinking and feeling all along, but were afraid to talk about. I am not clear about the matter of courage. A certain kind of congenital obliviousness might be a more proper term. A patient of mine during the book’s early days happened to be at a cocktail party where she overheard a conversation between my mother and another elderly woman. Referring to the book, the other woman said, “You certainly must be very proud of your son, Scotty.” To which my mother replied, in the sometimes tart way of the elderly, “Proud? No, not ...

Three Quests in Philosophy by Etienne Gilson Foreword [by  James K. Farge] This slim volume contains seven previously unpublished lectures by Etienne Gilson. [1] He delivered the first of them, “The Education of a Philosopher,” in Montréal in 1963. The next three, grouped under the title “In Quest of Species,” were delivered in Toronto in January 1972. Gilson composed the last three, which he titled “In Quest of Matter,” at his home in Cravant (Yonne), France ; but his advanced age and declining health prevented his travelling to Canada . He therefore sent them to Laurence K. Shook in Toronto with the hope that they might eventually be published. “That is why I am anxious to do the job,” wrote the late Father Armand Maurer, Gilson’s student and disciple, in 2006. [2] The first lecture was prompted when a group of students in philosophy at the Université de Montréal invited Gilson to speak at their inaugural “Semaine de Philosophie” on Tuesday, 19 March 1963. ...