Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Photo: Medium
Continue reading “Serenity and Acceptance”Wisdom and happiness have long been associated with a certain serenity—an acceptance of one’s life and one’s self, in all their beauties, limitations, and imperfections.
Photo: Afrocentric Confessions
Continue reading “A Lovely Thing Done Together”Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
Toni Morrison, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”
Photo: Medium
Continue reading “A More Novelistic Approach”We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.
Chinua Achebe, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”
Photo: The New York Times
Continue reading “Something Else Stands Beside It”What is both unfortunate and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently the trauma of a diminished existence…. The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
Photo: She Counseling
Continue reading “Trauma and Community”Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel, that—unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the good will of others—art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
Toni Morrison, Roundtable on the Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World
Photo: Nasty Women Writers
Continue reading “Simply Human”It is only by seeing ourselves as fundamentally other—the contingent product of a culture that has no particular monopoly on truth—that we can come into our wisest possible, most “utterly human” selves.
Continue reading “Slow Reveals”At a time when white masculinity has driven what Barbara Tuchman called “the persistence of unwisdom in government” to new depths, narratives like Mbue’s and Nguyen’s could not be more important, nor more welcome.
Continue reading “Empathy and Irony”But then along comes “Behold the Dreamers,” a debut novel by a young woman from Cameroon that illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Continue reading “Empathy and Cultural Dislocation”When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to the position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy.
Barack Obama, in Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Continue reading “The Poignancy of Things”Chris Marker’s Sans soleil exemplifies the journey to wisdom, without once mentioning that concept.