In Praise of Nothing

In Praise of Nothing PDF Author: Ellen M. Chen
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456826115
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the fi rst work devoted to an expositi on on Daoist metaphysics and presenti ng Dao as a feminine principle. The work should be of interest to scholars and general readers in many disciplines: Comparati ve philosophy, religious studies, metaphysics, Asian studies, Chinese studies... etc.

In Praise of Nothing

In Praise of Nothing PDF Author: Ellen M. Chen
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456826115
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the fi rst work devoted to an expositi on on Daoist metaphysics and presenti ng Dao as a feminine principle. The work should be of interest to scholars and general readers in many disciplines: Comparati ve philosophy, religious studies, metaphysics, Asian studies, Chinese studies... etc.

Praise Nothing

Praise Nothing PDF Author: Joshua Robbins
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1557289972
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 76

Get Book Here

Book Description
Finalist: 2013 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In Praise of Wasting Time

In Praise of Wasting Time PDF Author: Alan Lightman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501154370
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this timely and essential book that offers a fresh take on the qualms of modern day life, Professor Alan Lightman investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam, without attempting to accomplish anything and without any assigned tasks. We are all worried about wasting time. Especially in the West, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which the twenty-­four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced down to ten minute units of efficiency. We take our iPhones and laptops with us on vacation. We check email at restaurants or our brokerage accounts while walking in the park. When the school day ends, our children are overloaded with “extras.” Our university curricula are so crammed our young people don’t have time to reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning. Yet in the face of our time-driven existence, a great deal of evidence suggests there is great value in “wasting time,” of letting the mind lie fallow for some periods, of letting minutes and even hours go by without scheduled activities or intended tasks. Gustav Mahler routinely took three or four-­hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he visited his country house. In his 1949 autobiography, Albert Einstein described how his thinking involved letting his mind roam over many possibilities and making connections between concepts that were previously unconnected. With In Praise of Wasting Time, Professor Alan Lightman documents the rush and heave of the modern world, suggests the technological and cultural origins of our time-­driven lives, and examines the many values of “wasting time”—for replenishing the mind, for creative thought, and for finding and solidifying the inner self. Break free from the idea that we must not waste a single second, and discover how sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.

In Praise of Nothing

In Praise of Nothing PDF Author: Eric LeMay
Publisher: Emergency Press
ISBN: 0989473678
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do we keep playing the lottery when we know we’ll lose? How does what we laugh at—those bad jokes, wry allusions, and nasty pratfalls—tell us who we are? And what happens when, through some unforeseen mishap, we lose our identities and become Jane or John Doe? Eric LeMay explores these and other questions in fifteen innovative essays that center on the American self. From reflections on small-town life and baby-making to meditations on found art, 19th century landscape gardens, webcams, and the emergence of the AIDS pandemic, these essays celebrate the layered selves we inhabit, inherent, and sometime invent. With humor and with reverence, In Praise of Nothing beholds what Wallace Stevens has called the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays

In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays PDF Author: Bertrand Russell
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description


Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing

Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing PDF Author: Samuel Hoffenstein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Praise of Folly

The Praise of Folly PDF Author: Desiderius Erasmus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folly
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description


Do Nothing

Do Nothing PDF Author: Celeste Headlee
Publisher: Harmony
ISBN: 1984824740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A welcome antidote to our toxic hustle culture of burnout.”—Arianna Huffington “This book is so important and could truly save lives.”—Elizabeth Gilbert “A clarion call to work smarter [and] accomplish more by doing less.”—Adam Grant We work feverishly to make ourselves happy. So why are we so miserable? Despite our constant search for new ways to optimize our bodies and minds for peak performance, human beings are working more instead of less, living harder not smarter, and becoming more lonely and anxious. We strive for the absolute best in every aspect of our lives, ignoring what we do well naturally and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. Why do we measure our time in terms of efficiency instead of meaning? Why can’t we just take a break? In Do Nothing, award-winning journalist Celeste Headlee illuminates a new path ahead, seeking to institute a global shift in our thinking so we can stop sabotaging our well-being, put work aside, and start living instead of doing. As it turns out, we’re searching for external solutions to an internal problem. We won’t find what we’re searching for in punishing diets, productivity apps, or the latest self-improvement schemes. Yet all is not lost—we just need to learn how to take time for ourselves, without agenda or profit, and redefine what is truly worthwhile. Pulling together threads from history, neuroscience, social science, and even paleontology, Headlee examines long-held assumptions about time use, idleness, hard work, and even our ultimate goals. Her research reveals that the habits we cling to are doing us harm; they developed recently in human history, which means they are habits that can, and must, be broken. It’s time to reverse the trend that’s making us all sadder, sicker, and less productive, and return to a way of life that allows us to thrive.

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life PDF Author: Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307420655
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
A memoir in bite-size chunks from the author of the viral Modern Love column “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” “[Rosenthal] shines her generous light of humanity on the seemingly humdrum moments of life and shows how delightfully precious they actually are.” —The Chicago Sun-Times How do you conjure a life? Give the truest account of what you saw, felt, learned, loved, strived for? For Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the surprising answer came in the form of an encyclopedia. In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life she has ingeniously adapted this centuries-old format for conveying knowledge into a poignant, wise, often funny, fully realized memoir. Using mostly short entries organized from A to Z, many of which are cross-referenced, Rosenthal captures in wonderful and episodic detail the moments, observations, and emotions that comprise a contemporary life. Start anywhere—preferably at the beginning—and see how one young woman’s alphabetized existence can open up and define the world in new and unexpected ways. An ordinary life, perhaps, but an extraordinary book.

In Praise of Nonsense

In Praise of Nonsense PDF Author: Winfried Menninghaus
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804783063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing—such are the examples Kant's Critique of Judgment offers for a "free" and purely aesthetic beauty. Menninghaus's book demonstrates that all these examples refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in displacing it, addresses genuinely "modern" phenomena. The early Romantic poetics and literature of the arabesque follow and radicalize Kant's move. Menninghaus shows parergonality and "nonsense" to be two key features in the spread of the arabesque from architecture and the fine arts to philosophy and finally to literature. On the one hand, comparative readings of the parergon in Enlightenment aesthetics, Kant, and Schlegel reveal the importance of this term for establishing the very notion of a self-reflective work of art. On the other hand, drawing on Kant's posthumous anthropological notebooks, Menninghaus extrapolates an entire Kantian theory of what it means to produce nonsense and why the Critique of Judgment defines genius precisely through the power (as well as the dangers) of doing so. Ludwig Tieck's 1797 rewriting of Charles Perrault's famous Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an "arabesque" book "without any sense and coherence." Menninghaus's close reading of this capricious narrative reveals a specifically Romantic—as opposed, say, to a Victorian or dadaistic—type of nonsense. Benjamin's as well as Propp's, Lévi-Strauss's, and Meletinskij's oppositions of myth and fairy tale lend additional credit to a Romantic poetics that inaugurates "universal poetry" while performing a bizarre trajectory through arabesque ornament, nonsense, parergonality, and the fairy tale.