Paul Carus (1852-1919) was a highly regarded writer on philosophy and comparative religion and a major influence in introducing Buddhist and other Eastern ideas to the West. The History of the Devil is his magnum opus on the evolution of the idea of evil from ancient to modern times. Carus follows the devil around the world through his manifestations in many cultures and historic periods. At once scholarly and intriguing, the text is enhanced by 350 rare and fascinating illustrations.
About the author
(Photo from Parliament of the World’s Religions on YouTube)
Paul Carus, Ph.D. (18 July 1852 – 11 February 1919) was a German-American author, editor, a student of comparative religion, and professor of philosophy.
Carus considered himself a theologian rather than philosopher. He is proposed to be a pioneer in the promotion of interfaith dialogue. He explored the relationship of science and religion, and was instrumental in introducing Eastern traditions and ideas to the West. He was a key figure in the introduction of Buddhism, to the West.
(Goodreads.com)
Excerpts:
“The God of the future will not be personal, but superpersonal.”
“The word Satan, which means ‘enemy,’ is freely used, but as a proper name, signifying the Devil, is used only five times [in the Old Testament].”
“…once a man died and awoke in the other world. There St. Peter appeared before him and asked him what he watned. He then ordred breakfast, the dailypapers, and all the comforts he was accustomed to in life, and this kind of life lasted for many centuriesi until he got sick of it and began to swear at St. Peter and to compain of how monotonous it was in Heaven., whereupon St. Peter informed him he was in Hell. for hell is where everybody has his own sweet will, and heaven is where everybody follows God’s will alone.”
Bertha von Suttner devotes in her ingenious book The Inventory of a Soul a whole chapter to the proposition “The Principle of Evil a Phantom.” She says:
“I do not believe in the phantoms of badness, misery, and death. They are mere shadows, zeros, nothingnesses. They are negations of real things, but not real things themselves… There is light, but there is no darkness: darkness is only the non-existence of light. There is life, death is only a local ceasing of life-phenomena. . . . We grant that Ormuzd and Ahriman, God and Devil, are at least thinkable, but there are other opposites in which it is apparent that one is the non-existence of the other. For instance: noise and silence. Think of a silence so powerful as to suppress a noise. . . . Darkness has no degree, while light has. There is more light or less light, but various shades of darkness can mean only little or less light. Thus, life is a magnitude, but death is a zero. Something and nothing cannot be in struggle with each other. Nothing is without arms, nothing as an independent idea is only an abortion of human weaknesses . . . two are necessary to produce struggle. If I am in the room, I am here; if I leave it, I am no longer here. There can be no quarrel between my ego-present and ego-absent.”
Existence is one harmonious entirety; there is not a thing in the world but is embraced in the whole as a part of the whole. The One and All is the condition of every creature’s being; it is the breath of our breath, the sentiency of our feelings, the strength of our strength. Nothing exists of itself or to itself. All things are interrelated; and as all masses are held together by their gravity in a mutual attraction, so there is at the bottom of all sentiment a mysterious longing, a yearning for the fulness of the whole, a panpathy which finds a powerful utterance in the psalms of all the religions on earth. No creature is an isolated being, for the whole of existence affects the smallest of its parts. Says Emerson:
“All are needed by each one, Nothing is fair or good alone.”
The unity of the whole, the intercoherence of all things, the oneness of all norms that shape life, is not a mere theory but an actual reality; and in this sense the scriptural saying “God is Love” is a truth demonstrable by natural science.
Truly if we cannot have a religion which makes us free and independent, let us discard religion! Religion must be in accord not only with morality but also with philosophy; not only with justice, but also with science; not only with order, but also with freedom.
So long as the truth is something foreign to us, we speak of obedience to the truth; but when we have learned to identify ourselves with truth, the moral ought ceases to be a tyrannical power above us, and we feel ourselves as its representatives; it changes into aspirations in us. True religion is love of truth, and being such it will not end in a feeling of dependence, but reap the fruit of truth, which is liberty, freedom, independence.
“An avid reader of occult books, Hitler underlined this sentence in his copy of Ernst Schertel’s Magic: History, Theory, Practice (1923): ‘The man with the greatest force of imagination commands the world and creates realities according to his will.’ A similar idea has long been dear to the hearts of positive thinkers in America.”
[According to Gabriela Herstik] “Self-love is not enough, self-lust is required to awaken true individuality.”
Hemingway wrote: “A big Austrian trench mortar bomb of the type that used to be called ash cans, exploded in the darkness. I died then. I felt my soul or something come right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.”
Ernest Hemingway, American Red Cross volunteer, recuperates from wounds in Milan, Italy, September 1918. (JFK Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Public Domain)
The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same).
Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create — it is no accident that Einstein attributed his best ideas to his practice of “combinatory play,” that Baudelaire turned to the season of play in his definition of genius as “nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.”
Because pure play liberates us from any notion of winning or losing and therefore liberates us from “the prisons we choose to live inside,” those in power have always tried to undermine the value of play. Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, derided play as an irrational and therefore unnecessary activity in which “the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.”
What you lose, of course, is yourself — that is the fundamental experience of flow characteristic of all true play and all creative work — and in so unselfing, you find the moment, you find the universe, you find wonder.
In the spring of 1933, partway in time between Bentham and Ackerman, the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga (December 7, 1872–February 1, 1945) took the podium at Leyden University to deliver his annual address as a rector. It startled all in attendance with its central insight nothing less than countercultural in a world still recovering from its first great war and already hurtling toward another: that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”
This would become the backbone of Huizinga’s visionary 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (public library). Animated by questions “hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy,” it went on to inspire everything from board games to mobile architecture to the magic circle concept of virtual worlds, and to influence generations of thinkers as sundry as Eric Berne (who cited Huizinga in his revolutionary 1964 book Games People Play), Richard Powers (who built the cathedral of his excellent novel Playground upon Huizinga’s foundation), and Thomas Merton (who underlined passages on nearly every page of his copy).
The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.
This may be why evolutionary theory — which is an explanatory framework based on reason: adaptation as cause and effect — has so far failed to explain why nature gave us play, as unnecessary and as hallowing as any act of grace:
In this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play. Nature, so our reasoning mind tells us, could just as easily have given her children all those useful functions of discharging superabundant energy, of relaxing after exertion, of training for the demands of life, of compensating for unfulfilled longings, etc., in the form of purely mechanical exercises and reactions. But no, she gave us play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun.
[…]
Play presents itself to us… as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives. As a regularly recurring relaxation, however, it becomes the accompaniment, the complement, in fact an integral part of life in general. It adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual — as a life function — and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.
Art from Kenny’s Window — Maurice Sendak’s forgotten philosophical first children’s book
Play is so compelling in part because it “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly,” free from the binaries of right and wrong that bind our ordinary lives. This is Huizinga’s most daring axiom: While the traditional view holds that moral development — the annealing of our rights and wrongs — is how societies advance, he argues that play is the true sculptor of civilization:
Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion of genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.
And yet for all this theorizing, Huizinga concedes that the role and riddle of play is a “question that eludes and deludes us to the end, in a lasting silence.” Nearly a century after him, Diane Ackerman turned that silence into song with her lyrical defense of “deep play” as that vital “combination of clarity, wild enthusiasm, saturation in the moment, and wonder” that makes life more alive.
When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world.
Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I refused to perpetrate the same injustice on the hamster. So he became The Hamster.
The way I remember it, one day the anonymous hamster vanished. After conducting an Interpol-level search around our small sublet, we looked at each other bewildered, then turned in unison to the only unexamined area — the open computer my father was assembling from parts in a corner of the living room. And there was The Hamster, tucked behind the motherboard, dead. (I would later learn that rodents seek out snug warm places to die in.) I wished that we could disassemble him and put him back together in working order. But although I had no notion of consciousness, I intuitively understood that a creature was fundamentally different from a computer — that although the computer could do math and The Hamster could not, The Hamster had an experience of hamsterness for which the computer had no analogue; that although both were now inanimate, The Hamster had been and had ceased to be in a way the tenseless computer never would — one a system of feeling in time, the other untouched by time and devoid of any internal felt experience of being a system.
Wassily Kandinsky: Sketch for Several Circles, 1926. (Available as a print.)
And yet the better metaphor for consciousness may have been sitting on the other side of the living room: my mother’s piano — atoms arranged into a certain configuration of matter that has reached a certain degree of complexity to become a piano so that humankind can send Bach into the cosmos and a five-year-old can madden the neighbors with endless renditions of the Moonlight Sonata. You can run the process backwards: Remove an atom from the piano and it remains a piano; keep going long enough, atom by atom, and it will eventually cease being a piano — but no particular atom marks the boundary of its unbecoming.
This is the currently accepted emergence model of consciousness — matter configured to such a degree of complexity that it becomes capable of experiencing itself.
But perhaps our entire model is broken.
Perhaps consciousness is not the instrument assembled atom by atom to play the music of being.
Perhaps it is the music itself.
Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)
That possibility — that consciousness is not emergent but fundamental, that it was always there in the universe even before gravity compacted the first atoms into the first star — is what Annaka Harris reckons with in her superb audio documentary Lights On.
Defying both the unsound mysticism and the unimaginative materialism into which most current views of consciousness fall, she invites a new dimension of thought to this Flatland of perspectives, tessellating ideas from cognitive science and quantum physics, string theory and assembly theory, mycorrhizal networks and AI. Drawing on two decades of working with neuroscientists and more than thirty hours of interviews with physicists, she picks up where her 2021 book Conscious left off to explore how our starting assumptions shape the questions we ask, which in turn shape the answers we constellate into reality: We have assumed that consciousness is complex and emergent because we are conscious and our complex brains took eons to evolve, but rather than something arising once non-conscious matter is configured in a particular way, consciousness might turn out to be an intrinsic property of matter that has existed for as long as the universe.
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Defining consciousness as “just the pure fact of felt experience,” she reflects in the introduction:
The mystery, as I see it, is why any collection of matter in the universe — even brain processing — would feel like anything at all, why when a certain light wavelength enters the retina and is processed by the brain, an experience of blue materializes. We don’t think that a camera or a computer has an experience of seeing blue, even though they also process lightwaves and can distinguish between blue an other wavelengths of light… without having a felt experience.
The mystery she examines is why some systems of matter have a felt experience of their internal processing — those incommunicables of what it is like to be me and what it is like to be you known as qualia, which cleave open the abyss between us. An epoch before neuroscience, Emily Dickinson — who marveled at “how an atom fell and yet the Heavens held… blue and solid” — grappled with the mystery of qualia:
How have I peace Except by subjugating Consciousness?
And since We’re mutual Monarch How this be Except by Abdication — Me — of Me?
Perhaps the hardest concession we have to make is that an abdication of the self is necessary for apprehending the fundamental. The self, after all, is a piano composing experience out of feeling and time — but with one being subjective and the other relative (possibly even emergent rather than fundamental, as half the physicists in the documentary believe time to be), a self is an instrument of interpretation whose readings are continually warped by the interpretation of experience that we call intuition, pocked with the “common pitfalls of common sense” Carl Sagan warned us against. Throughout the history of our species, our creaturely intuitions have repeatedly led us to miss or misperceive entire regions of reality. With an eye to such counterintuitive and disorienting discoveries as the sphericity of the Earth and the germ basis of disease — the ground so flat beneath our feet discovered to be curved, organisms we cannot perceive discovered to be deadly — Annaka looks back on the vector of knowledge to trace it forward toward a new model of reality:
Much of [the endeavor to understand consciousness] requires challenging some of our most innate intuitions about experience and what we call reality. I’ve always been interested in pushing the boundaries of our intuitions, and this is of course what science is largely about — science forces us to challenge the way we typically view the world to take a new perspective, to look out at the universe with fresh eyes. And every time we make a scientific breakthrough, every time we deepen our understanding significantly — especially as it relates to the fundamentals of reality — our intuitions get shaken up or shifted or molded into an entirely new field for the structure of reality.
In a chapter of the documentary exploring the new science of plant intelligence, Annaka — a longtime meditator and meditation teacher — recalls going for a run up a steep nature trail, entering a type of meditation where “your body can take on the hard work and your mind can just observe the experience.” From this pulsating center of her own felt experience, she observes the locus of other consciousnesses and qualia around her:
As I climbed and turned corners, I noticed the passing faces. It struck me… the simple and profound acknowledgement that everyone around me is having a full, rich, deep conscious experience — unique, private, and all-encompassing for each mind. With every passing person, there exists an inner world as undeniable, textured, and layered as I know mine to be. It’s strange that this obvious fact seems to take effort to recognize and requires a reminder. And then I started to think about just how much conscious activity is surrounding us — there are so many perspectives of the universe — and an image came to mind: something like illuminated dots across a dim glow, like an image of Earth from the Space Station, and then something more like a dark meadow, becoming dense with fireflies, lighting their way in the darkness, all of these beads of light representing conscious experiences flickering in and out of existence.
She looks at the dogs on the trail and wonders about the qualia of creatures living in an olfactory universe. She thinks about the unseen “rabbits and mice and ants and spiders,” each with a different umwelt. At the top of the hill, she contemplates the leaves of the trees with their intricate photoreceptors and root hair cells conferring upon them their own kind of experience of reality.
And the glowing dots densen in the darkness of non-being, leaving her with “a visceral sense that the world is just teeming with felt experience.” (I am reminded of the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd describing her transcendent experience of the mountain as “a glow in the consciousness.”)
These flickers of experience, Annaka argues across the sweep of the documentary, may be all there is.
If the self is a “controlled hallucination,” in the words of one scientist she interviews, and even space is emergent rather than fundamental, as most physicists now agree, perhaps Marie Howe captured the fundamental fundament in her splendid poem “Singularity” — perhaps there is “No I, no We, no one. No was… only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is.”
If experience is the ultimate substratum of reality, then we need what Annaka calls “experiential science” to better probe the nature of the universe — scientific theories and tools that would expand the human unwelt to allow us to experience “other systems and forces we don’t naturally perceive.” (Imagine seeing with the tetrachromacy of a hummingbird or navigating with the quantum magnetorception of a warbler.) We may then find ourselves gaining new intuitions about other ways of being and perhaps even find ways of communicating with other systems. (Imagine sensing the needs of a willow or understanding how a mushroom experiences sound.)
At the heart of Lights On — some of the finest listening hours of a lifetime — is a revelation as simple and beautiful as an equation. Annaka reflects:
We’re not just embedded in nature — we are nature.
A century ago, at the dawn of relativity and quantum mechanics, Virginia Woolf arrived at the same elemental truth via a different route — the garden path along which she reckoned with the meaning of life, parting “the cotton wool of daily life” to conclude:
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… We — I mean all human beings — are connected with this… The whole world is a work of art… We are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
“There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.”
–LEONORA CARRINGTON
Mary Leonora Carrington (April 6, 1917 – May 25, 2011) was a British-born, naturalised Mexican surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Wikipedia
In “Stag Dance,” Torrey Peters probes the complicated, evolving realities of queerness and trans life.
Credit…Ben Thompson
By Hugh Ryan
Updated March 18, 2025 (NYTimes.com)
Hugh Ryan is the author of “When Brooklyn Was Queer,” “The Women’s House of Detention” and, forthcoming in 2026, “Becoming History.”
Published March 8, 2025Updated March 18, 2025BUY BOOK ▾
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STAG DANCE: A Novel and Stories, by Torrey Peters
In an 1817 letter to his brothers, the poet John Keats defined the concept of negative capability as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This is a quintessential trait of a great writer, who must know everything but create characters who know nothing, or only the wrong things, or different things on different pages. In her discomforting new collection, “Stag Dance,” Torrey Peters excels at this particular kind of unknowing. Hopscotching through genres and decades, Peters, across three short stories and a novella, summons up characters whose ideas about sex, gender and sexuality exist beyond (or before, or to the side of) our current orthodoxies.
Set in the early 1900s, the titular novella explores what happens when a restless winter camp of “timber pirates” decides to throw a gender-bending soiree. Any man can declare himself a “skooch” for the night and be courted by the others, but when the biggest, ugliest lumberjack, Babe Bunyan, steps up first, it upsets the camp’s surprisingly fragile hierarchy of manhood. Babe Bunyan knows the other men expect (and even want) Lisen, the youngest, slightest, most feminine axman to take the role of skooch.
Bunyan’s own desires are unclear even to him. He wants to play the skooch, and he wants the men to court him, but more than anything, Bunyan wants Lisen to recognize that they are the same in some essential way that he can’t define. Plaintively, he wonders, “How do you beg when you don’t even know the words to beg with?” When this desire for sisterhood gets thwarted, the stag dance becomes a violent competition. “We were rivals,” Bunyan reflects of his new dynamic with Lisen. That, in a way, is his dream achieved. Because “to be rivals is to be something the same.”
The other stories in “Stag Dance”run a gamut of painful settings, from future dystopia, to girls’ weekend gone wrong, to aborted boarding school romance. In her acknowledgments, Peters says that she wrote each tale “to puzzle out, through genre, the inconvenient aspects of my never-ending transition — otherwise known as ongoing trans life — aspects that didn’t seem to accord with slogans, ‘good’ politics, or the currently available language.” Strip away the (sometimes clunky) antiquarian diction, and it’s not hard to see a parallel between Babe Bunyan and a modern queer person just coming out, fascinated, infuriated and a little in love with someone one step further on their gender journey.
Peters excels at plumbing the murky hearts of queer people. Her characters betray one another and themselves, and occasionally end the world in their desire for revenge. They embrace feelings they’re not supposed to have. Frequently they’re tormented by external manifestations of aspects of themselves that they have yet to admit, define or find a way to love.
In the most disturbing of the stories, “The Masker,” two women at a trans and cross-dressing convention in Las Vegas plan to publicly humiliate a third attendee, who they feel is not legitimately queer, just a fetishist in a “poreless silicone skin” suit. As with the lumberjacks of “Stag Dance,” however, it’s the similarity between the characters that brings the story to its inevitably cruel and heartbreaking conclusion. Krys, the narrator, hates how she’s “saddled with a stupid fetish or gender or whatever.” When her trans friend Sally points out “the masker” at the convention and calls “him” a “pervert,” Krys is struck by “the disturbing knowledge that comes from distinguishing in others the parts of yourself that you most hate.” Is she a fetishist, a trans woman, both, or neither — and who gets to decide? Ultimately, Krys must sacrifice either Sally or the masker, and in so doing, sacrifice part of herself.
The collectionwill likely make readers of all genders uncomfortable. That’s on purpose. Peters’s characters are complicated, in pain, angry and unsure of their own identities or desires. Her award-winning first novel, 2021’s “Detransition, Baby,” also courted controversy, by centering a character whose gender was messy, unclear and still evolving. Peters is not interested in “positive” representation; she’s interested in authenticity. She wants to show that all parts of the queer experience, even the disturbing parts or the parts we don’t understand, are worthy of being made into art. That includes jealousy, doubt and negative capability.
A great Torrey Peters story feels like punching yourself in the face, laughing at the bleeding bitch in the mirror and then shamefacedly realizing you’re aroused by the blood on your lips. The four pieces in “Stag Dance”will leave you bruised, broken and wanting more.
STAG DANCE: A Novel and Stories | By Torrey Peters | Random House | 288 pp. | $28
A version of this article appears in print on April 6, 2025, Page 8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Fluid Dynamics. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
“In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.”
Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) Dutch Priest
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
This card brings in a swift, bright energy which clears our heads, allowing us to see right the way to the heart of things, undistracted by clutter or red herrings. Here we can ‘cut to the chase’ so to speak, avoiding any of the tempting, but wasteful, side issues that may come up around important issues.If you flow well with this energy, you’ll finding yourself thinking quickly and clearly, finding unexpected solutions to apparently intractable problems. Matters which had, until now, refused to yield their solutions, will suddenly start willingly spitting them out, so you can clear several obstacles from your path on a day ruled by the Knight of Swords.Intuition plays quite a strong role here, too, as you move into closer touch with your psychic ability, thereby accessing answers to awkward questions which you had before felt frustrated by.Accordingly, on a day ruled by the Knight of Swords, pick out the things which have been giving you headaches in the last little while. Spend a little time (not too much) considering the apparent obstacles and difficulties of the problem. Then forget it! At some point during the day, a solution should quite simply pop into your head. Also keep a close watch on your dreams overnight – these may contain the answers you seek. You can probably get away with dealing with two medium serious problems – but if you have one BIG one, only concentrate on that.Also be alert to messages and hints coming through the normal patterns of life. Sometimes you’ll get explanations from the most unexpected sources.
Affirmation: “Every problem contains the seed of its own resolution.”
UC Berkeley Gradua • Mar 21, 2025 Historian Heather Cox Richardson joins UC Berkeley professor Dylan Penningroth for a discussion on the evolution of the U.S. political parties. Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening and writer of Letters from an American, brings her expertise in 19th-century American history to analyze today’s political landscape. Penningroth, a legal historian and author of Before the Movement, offers insights into the hidden history of Black civil rights.
“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the ‘still small voice’ within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority.”
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 2, 1869 – January 30, 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. Wikipedia
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
