• Philosophy - Plays - Psychology

    Heaven, Hell and OTHER People: Finding Happiness in “The Good Life”

    November 12, 2023 - By 

    French philosopher and playwright Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play, “No Exit,” envisioned a hell devoid of searing flames, torture devices or red-eyed devils pitchforking inhabitants for eternity. But that doesn’t mean the punishment for unredeemed sinners wasn’t awful beyond imagining. Sartre instead placed multiple people in a locked room—in this case, two women and one man—carefully selected to provoke maximum and mutual psychological discomfort upon one another by picking astutely at the scabs of the moral failings that landed each of them in this dreaded situation, yes, for all eternity. “Anything but that!”, we can hear ourselves saying in sympathy with…

  • General Nonfiction - Psychology

    A Larger Vision:
    Frank Bruni’s “The Beauty of Dusk”

    April 29, 2023 - By 

    “We have no control over what happens to us; we have enormous control over what happens to us. I’ll spend the rest of my life better understanding and better accepting that paradox, which I understand and accept better today than I did before October, 2017, before that first day of incomprehensible blur, before an education in neuro-ophthalmology that became an education in so much more.” That sentence near the end of “New York Times” columnist-turned-college-professor Frank Bruni’s 2022 memoir, “The Beauty of Dusk,” underpins most all the reflections on his ongoing experience of a rare stroke that robs him of vision in…

  • Psychology

    Virus Dreams

    April 13, 2020 - By 

    You don’t have to be a Jungian psychologist to know that dreams can be the most confounding things. Your long-dead mother is brewing coffee and turns to you with a beatific smile as a torrent of word salad comes out of her mouth, whereupon a parrot flies right through a closed window and hops onto her shoulder to translate it as a long poem by Sophocles, the meaning of which you grasp instantly even though you hate poetry, have never read Sophocles in your life and wouldn’t know him from Maya Angelou. Then the parrot dons an apron and asks—in…

  • Psychology - Religion

    In Praise of the Darkness

    December 4, 2019 - By 

    A rather well-known book once began with this rather foreboding line: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.” A few lines down in that same story, we read: “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years…” Much later on in the Book of Matthew, Jesus talks about sinners being flung into the darkness, where there is “wailing and gnashing of teeth.”  That would be down there with the…

  • General Nonfiction - Psychology

    Life, Aging, Death, Self:
    Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal”

    February 17, 2019 - By 

    The problem isn’t so much that in the end, we die. It’s in all the time leading up to the end. Not death, but severe decline is what puts fear in our hearts. A long debilitating illness or just aging that cuts us off progressively (regressively, come to think of it) from all that we love. We all peak physically at some 30 years of age, but robustness and increased life satisfaction can persist for decades longer as we go about building our lives, hopefully coming to accept our aging and its limitations with equanimity and often, good doses of…