Alberto Moravia writes about existentialism through his characters. In fact, he was, in many ways, even celebrated as the founder of the literary existentialist movement, before Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In Moravia’s Contempt, existentialism embodies many forms. The characters of Moravia are not religious, they believe in no afterlife, and no universal order or...
The idea, today, is to meditate on our psyche’s intuition. As understood/elucidated by Carl Jung in his collected works, Psychological Types. “Intuition means to look at or into. I regard intuition as a basic psychological function. It is the function that mediates perceptions in an unconscious way. Everything, whether outer or inner objects or...
Cinema Paradiso is a comforting film. It’s a cure for loneliness because it lifts you out of your reality and places you into a poignant and wistful one. However, once you get too close to the bliss that it emanates, it covers you in a blanket of melancholia and longing. The story is one...
When you read a book like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, your conscience’s worst nightmare is your waking reality. The words wound you. Your skin crawls, your heart jumps, but your mind survives. It survives because that is where literature possesses its own soul, heaven, and hell. And when you,...
There are people whose past events exist on a linear trail. Each moment is a stamp upon a smooth and unruffled surface. This makes reminiscing a past self easier, more coherent, perhaps even rectifiable. Then there are people like Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations whose past is an assortment of terrifying and pleasant moments....