Secret Sorrow – Knut Hamsun

Secret Sorrow – Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a major Norwegian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun’s work spans more than seventy years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment. He published more than twenty novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some […]

Le portrait de Néith

Le portrait de Néith

Les yeux de Néith contemplent, à l’instar du cadran solaire, les révolutions des astres, pour épancher – simultanément avec les instants de silence concentré, dans lesquels se produisent les arrêts de leurs aiguilles bien aiguisées – une nébuleuse liquide d’humeurs toujours nouvellement étoilées, pleines de poussière fluorescente. C’est le passage de l’expression d’une volonté longtemps […]

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

Bertrand Russell saw the history of civilization as being shaped by an unfortunate oscillation between two opposing evils: tyranny and anarchy, each of which contain the seed of the other. The best course for steering clear of either one, Russell maintained, is liberalism. “The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation,” writes […]

No absolute time

No absolute time

Two centuries before Einstein, Hume recognised that universal time, independent of an observer’s viewpoint, doesn’t exist In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have […]

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture

Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction. Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time, he was a graduate […]