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Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Why do we continue to cling so hard to our work-based identities, in spite of an inner nature that tells us not to work so much?

The history of what we call work.


“Why do we continue to cling so hard to our work-based identities, in spite of an inner nature that tells us not to work so much?”


Making a Living




Email: It gives license to verbiage and turns simple conversations into an exchange of overcrafted essays. It’s time to close our inboxes  Emails  




The Open Society and Its Prophets

Henri Bergson’s original heuristic of open and closed societies emphasizes that liberalism is a religion born out of moments of mystical perception and faith



BY
BLAKE SMITH





“I know mine exists, my cruelty,” wrote a young Patricia Highsmith. “Though where I cannot precisely say, for I try always to purge myself of  evil 

Patricia High-smith, who published twenty-two novels, including “Deep Water” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” died in 1995, at the age of seventy-four. By the time of her death, she had alienated many of the people in her life, espousing racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise offensive views, but the eight thousand pages of diaries and notebooks she left behind—an edited version of which will be published this November—depict an engaged, social, and optimistic youth. The following selections begin in the spring of 1948, when the twenty-seven-year-old Highsmith had a two-month residency at the Yaddo artists’ colony. There, she met the British writer Marc Brandel, with whom she began an on-again, off-again relationship, and finished writing her first novel, “Strangers on a Train.” To make money, for several years Highsmith wrote for comics, including those published by Timely, which later became Marvel. In December, 1948, she also found seasonal work in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s, where she sold a doll to Mrs. E. R. Senn, the wife of a wealthy businessman from New Jersey, who became the inspiration for the character Carol, in her novel “The Price of Salt,” which was first published, in 1952, under a pseudonym.