To mark Albert Camus's hundredth birthday, on November 7th, Maria Popova posted a collection of the author's meditations on happiness and sorrow.
If Proust's Albertine (in real life, more than probably a man) is a portal for the author's meditations on romantic possession, sexual jealousy and the unknowability of others, then Rose's version is wilfully and consistently indeterminate.
A search for the facts about Emmett Miller, a blackface minstrel of the 1920's and 30's whom Tosches calls "the strangest and most stunning of stylists ever to record"; and the author's meditations on creativity and originality, provoked by his incomplete quest.
Frivolous though they may sound, they're integral to this British author's intricate meditation on the nature of appearance and reality in late-18th-century Europe -- an age, as one character reminds us, of "tricksters and shape-shifters and chameleons".
The author's unsparing meditation on his mother, who died at 54 from cancer, examines the inspiring yet destructive force of her love, and probes the mystery of one woman's jagged, willful character and the way it imprints itself on her son.
But it takes fiction — the recapitulation of a life based on an author's sustained meditation on what it all must have felt like — to provide that ineffable access, to get at the truth of another human life that is not one's own.
Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a powerful psychological memoir and meditation on the author's experience at Auschwitz, argues that meaning, not success or happiness, is the driving pursuit of human life.
That evening, I attended a lecture by best-selling author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, who's often credited with bringing meditation from India to the United States in the 1970s.
Today's meditation features a TED talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert.
It's both an exploration of courage and a meditation on its author's background, as well as being a coded rebuke to the Manhattan literati who, in their devotion to the values of the New Yorker (Wolfe's bete noir) and also Partisan Review, perceived military men as "brutes and philistines".
