Nick Fletcher

MA English student

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the Odyssey Christopher Nolan drew on for his new film, has brought Homer back from antiquity. One of the most celebrated translators in the world, she is reviving a fading academic discipline and shining with a harsh and brilliant light in the humanities’ gathering gloom. “The ancient Greeks teach one to be modern,” the poet and classicist A. E. Stallings observed. “They taught that to me and to Emily. It was time to strip away all the mannered layers—the tarnish of centuries—and she does that. Her translations have the freshness of the sky after a storm. Read Judith Thurman’s 2023 profile of the translator: https://t.co/4c9tma8Cdq

[Bianca Stone @biancastone]

🪓ah 🌸

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

"Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity.

Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer. In this respect, too, we are becoming hostile towards form.

Apparently, the ascendancy of morality is compatible with the barbarization of society. Morality is formless. Moral inwardness dispenses with form. One might even say: the more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is."

-- Byung-Chul Han

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.”

— Edward Abbey

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

I need this poem so much right now, and am so glad Andrea Gibson created it.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I get blown away every time I read this paragraph by Carl Jung:

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“I lived so carefully, thinking someone was watching. But the stage was empty, the audience never came.”  

— Osamu Dazai

[Maaraa @Maraaaks]

"Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else."

William Faulkner, Light in August

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

- Robert Anton Wilson

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“No intelligent person is interested in dominating others. His first interest is to know himself.”

― Osho

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Nothing comes close to this paragraph by Dostoevsky on the brutal truth of self-deception.

[Into The Forest Dark @ElliottBlackwe3]

“He who kisses joy as it flies by will live in eternity's sunrise.”
― William Blake

[ONLY POEMS @onlypoemsmag]

I have to tell you

[兔兒神 @chenchenwrites]

Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious.

—Louise Glück

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

—Aldous Huxley

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary."

--Terence McKenna

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

This is Goethe on why reading alone is not enough:

“People think that by reading they become learned; but it is not so. Reading only supplies materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. Without reflection, what we take in remains external and does not truly belong to us.”

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This sentence by Dostoyevsky never fails to hit hard:

“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.”

― Charles Bukowski