Mozart was famously fidgety – he constantly drummed his fingers and was unable to even wash his hands without pacing. Apparently, Mozart’s wife Constanze didn’t trust him with a knife because he was prone to injuring himself. So, in addition to being one of the world’s greatest composers, Mozart was … Read More
Month: June 2018
“He felt as if he was never again going to know the reason for anything he did.”
Why read novels? Jonathan Franzen argues in a Harper’s essay that people are drawn to strong fiction because they like to engage in complex stories that don’t have simple resolutions. In Anne Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, the central character, a law student, tries to learn … Read More
“I could feel nothing except the burden of my own life and the exhaustion, the apparent futility, of trying to sustain it.”
This week, the Centers for Disease Control released a report that said that suicide rates in the United States have risen nearly 30% since 1999. With the issue of mental health in the news so frequently lately, I am looking for guidance from Parker Palmer’s essays on depression. He describes … Read More
“The failure was flooded with genius.”
This book focuses on one remarkable ten-month period when some of the most interesting people in the world – Sigmund Freud, Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Gustav Klimt – lived in Vienna, which had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. Why did so many people in this … Read More