Tag: language

A Lovely Thing Done Together

June 5, 2025December 18, 2025 Peter Starr

Photo: Afrocentric Confessions

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

Toni Morrison, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”

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Tagged Beloved, Bildungsroman, bodies in pieces, collaboration, dispossession, humility, imagination, language, narrative, Nobel Prize, reader, repetition, slavery, storytelling, Toni Morrison, trauma, violence, wisdom

Holding the Self Lightly

June 5, 2025December 18, 2025 Peter Starr

Ruth-Ozeki_Courtesy-of-Ruth-Ozeki_CLR-1200x801

Photos: The Oberlin Review, Penguin Books

Language has adhesive properties…, drawing us together by enabling us to share our stories…. By inviting us into another’s skin, novels encourage us to practice empathy. And good novels celebrate the myriad complexities of individuals by creating ample room for all characters to have a voice.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

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Tagged A Tale for the Time Being, age, bliss, bullying, complexity, culture, dialogue, Dōgen Zenji, dualism, empathy, ethics, heroism, horror, humanism, interbeing, Japan, language, narrative, no self, Not-two, novel of formation, posthumanism, quantum mechanics, reader, ritual, Ruth Ozeki, Schrödinger's cat, self, shadow of death, suicide, time, war, wisdom, writer, Zen Buddhism