Odyssey of a Wandering Mind

Odyssey of a Wandering Mind PDF Author: Jennifer Horne
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361367
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A carefully rendered portrait of a brilliant but troubled daughter of the Old South who struggled against the conventions of gender, class, family, and ultimately of sanity, yet survived to define a creative life of her own Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama's governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly managed the family landholdings before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theater. Inventing a plastic compound while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as a journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and even a young John F. Kennedy, while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she struggled to find her way with both work and family, becoming increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years. Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts--sometimes delusional, always savvy--to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of "having been restored to sanity," enabling her to manage her own financial affairs and to live how and where she pleased. She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel based on the life of Mona Lisa, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Sara Mayfield left behind to sensitively render Mayfield's struggle to move through the world as the person she was--and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story.

Witness to a Wandering Mind

Witness to a Wandering Mind PDF Author: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781499773873
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The story of a sleepy village, set in the backdrop of early 20th century undivided Punjab, takes the reader through the twists and turns of the author's life. It graphically describes the events where fears and falsity land various characters in unsavoury situations and how they bear the fruits of their karma. There is Parmanand, who left the sanctuary of a safe but vacuous existence, in search of a better but unfathomed life to turn into a neurotic teacher. There is Indro, who had to carry the cross of a tedious life to lose vitality in a wasting physiology. It is an account of Devki, who became the mother of sons older than herself and also suffered early widowhood. There is a near death experience of a sensitive child and also of certain death of a new born, one brought about by complex circumstances. There is turmoil and trauma on the eve of Independence. There is Congress, there is Muslim League and there is RSS. There is a painful incidence of personal incarcination engendered by misconceived sense of sacrifice. With an uncanny eye for detail, the author delineates various lives to analyse if the Law of Karma is, indeed, rooted in actions sown as seeds to bring forth fruits, now or hereafter. Without getting involved with the playfulness of his wandering mind, he endeavours to study if there is some order underneath a seeming chaotic existence. In the process, he looks at the real, imperfect, flawed, quirky, weird, beautiful and magical side of the dramatis personae to take the first steps towards Self realization.

The Wandering Mind

The Wandering Mind PDF Author: Michael C. Corballis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022623861X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Corballis argues that mind-wandering has many constructive and adaptive features. These range from mental time travel?the wandering back and forth through time, not only to plan our futures based on past experience, but also to generate a continuous sense of who we are--to the ability to inhabit the minds of others, increasing empathy and social understanding. Through mind-wandering, we invent, tell stories, and expand our mental horizons. Mind wandering , hardly the sign of a faulty network or aimless distraction, actually underwrites creativity, whether as a Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, or an Einstein imagining himself travelling on a beam of light. Corballis takes readers on a mental journey in chapters that can be savored piecemeal, as the minds of readers wander in different ways, and sometimes have limited attentional capacity.

Odyssey to Freedom

Odyssey to Freedom PDF Author: Kyabje Gelek Rinpoche
Publisher: Jewel Heart
ISBN: 1934994014
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description


My Wandering Mind

My Wandering Mind PDF Author: D C Jefferson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
This book will blow your mind away and make you re-think the way you think! A very clever deep dive into the mind of the author and an astonishing read for all.

Odyssey

Odyssey PDF Author: Homer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198788805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.

Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture

Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture PDF Author: Silvia Montiglio
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226534979
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
"Examining the act of wandering through many lenses, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture addresses questions such as: Why did the Greeks associate the figure of the wanderer with the condition of exile? How was the expansion of the world under Rome reflected in the connotations of wandering? Does a person learn by wandering, or is wandering a deviation from the truth? In the end, this matchless volume shows how the transformations that affected the figure of the wanderer coincided with new perceptions of the world and of travel, and invites us to consider its definition and import today."--BOOK JACKET.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey PDF Author: Homer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140268867
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles A Penguin Classic Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy." So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in the New York Times Book Review hails as "a distinguished achievement." If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb introduction and textual commentary provide insightful background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles's translation. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the general reader, to captivate a new generation of Homer's students. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition features French flaps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Homer's Secret Odyssey

Homer's Secret Odyssey PDF Author: Kenneth Wood
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752463896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Homer is renowned as the finest of the storytellers who for countless generations passed down by word of mouth the myths and legends of Ancient Greece. Yet, for some 2500 years there have been persistent folk memories that his genius extended far beyond literature and that scientific knowledge was hidden in his stories of heroes and villains, gods and ghosts, monsters and witches. Research now reveals that at a time when the Greeks did not have a written script, Homer concealed an astonishing range of learning about calendar making and cycles of the sun, moon and planet Venus in the Odyssey, his epic of the Fall of Troy and the adventures of the warrior-king Odysseus.

Homer

Homer PDF Author: Homer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description