Herta Müller is the author of ‘Everything I Possess I Carry With Me’ (German: ‘Atemschaukel’). Last year she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is born in Romania (1953) and she has lived under the repressive regime of Ceauşescu. Her father had been a member of the Waffen SS during World War II, in [...]
Browsing the archives for the English category
9 May 10
16 Dec 09
Reading Eliot’s poems is a nice way to spend winter evenings.
I found a quote, from the second of The Four Quarters, “East Coker”
“Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The [...]
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Posted in Poetry
15 Dec 09
Sonnet 1
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decrease,
His tender heir mught bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’st flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now [...]
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Posted in Poetry
14 Dec 09
To read more about a critical view on what occurs daily at the laboratory bench or
in the interactions between scientists in the pursuit of their goals,
this book by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar is a real eye-opener.
Much of the mistakes that are made behind the screens is unknown to the public.
Scientists do blunder from time to time, sometimes good [...]
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Posted in Science
26 Nov 09
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
William Blake 1757-1827
Songs of Experience (1794) ‘The Sick Rose’
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Posted in Poetry
24 Nov 09
The sublime, which Edmund Burke examines in his major work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is one of the most intriguing terms in the field of aesthetic judgements. It suggests grandeur, vastness, awe and immense power when invoked to define the quality of a great literary or [...]
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Posted in Aesthetics
22 Nov 09
‘If you would like me to explain my philosophy of teaching I can do so,’ he said. ‘It is quite brief, brief and simple.’
‘Go on,’ I said, ‘let us hear your brief philosophy.’
‘What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning [...]
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Posted in Fiction
21 Nov 09
Laziness
I want to add something to this well-known story and tell you about some discoveries I have made in the Bibliothèque National in Paris. Much has been written about Diderot’s nephew and Goethe’s translation. Although the existence of 1821’s publication by de Saur and de Saint-Geniès is known, there has been hardly anyone who has [...]
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Posted in Literary Forgeries
