On February 17, 1673, Molière died after collapsing during a performance, sealing a life where theater and reality intertwined. His sharper legacy lies in language: he transformed satire into disciplined intelligence, shaping comic dialogue, social critique, and the evolution of modern dramatic prose across Europe, including English literature.
Death of Molière (1622–1673) – The Dramatist Who Taught Comedy to Think
I inaugurated my blog with a post about the relationship of two passages written by James Joyce, one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the other from Ulysses, both revolving around the word ‘yes’ (which was used in drastically different ways in the two passages). I connected these passages to Nietzsche’s philosophy, […]
Joyce and Nietzsche, Take 2
Inspired by Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, which explores various philosophical ideas and the nature of European society in the run-up to the First World War, The Empusium is Olga Tokarczuk’s sly, clever and erudite response – a health resort horror story in which the true horrors are the misogynistic views of men, […]
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
Born February 16, 1838, Henry Adams transformed historical writing into reflective art. In The Education of Henry Adams, he fused philosophy, autobiography, and analysis, proving that English nonfiction could think deeply while sounding elegant. His prose reshaped how history narrates consciousness, modernity, and the intellectual evolution of the self.
Birth of Henry Adams (1838–1918) – The Historian Who Turned Thought into Style
“It’s kinda like football. All you gotta do is get through dat gimlet.”I thought, it’s gauntlet, you ignorant shit. Then I started running.They tried to stop me, with their arms, their legs, with kicks and punches,but they didn’t tackle me or stand in my way. When I broke through andstood panting on the grass, I […]
Small Change
A wonderful magical store of my dear Paris. You have come here I am sure one time or another, we all have. I came here way back in my first encounter with Paris in 1972,and been back ever since. The Le Bon Marché is a department store located in a quadrilateral bordered by Rue de Sèvres, Rue de […]
The Le Bon Marché dept store of Paris !!!
This book is a unique scrapbook-style biography of Gustave Flaubert, narrated by a retired doctor, exploring his life, work, and the mystery surrounding his wife’s death through various creative formats.
Book Review : Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
The U.S. philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear, saw human beings as restless animals, whose defining trait was the uncontainable nature of their desire. No utopia that we can imagine will ever fully satisfy us – we will always want more. Lear’s interest in our irrepressible urge to transcend ourselves was already apparent in the first […]
Lear on Freud: the Uncontainable Nature of Desire
penwithlit