What is the difference between mysticism and empiricism?
December 12, 2020
The misclassification of experience
12December
AuthorLeif Frenzel
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.
December 5, 2020
Death: walking into the mirror
05December
[Note: This post has been superseded by an updated and more integrated article.] There is a rather special use of mirror imagery in Justine, when Durrell’s narrator reflects on his last conversation with the writer Pursewarden (which had taken place immediately before the latter committed suicide). The fact that this was our last meeting has invested it, in retrospect, with a significance which...
November 28, 2020
Meeting in the mirror
28November
[Note: This post has been superseded by an updated and more integrated article.] We have already seen two roles that mirrors play in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: they indicate a certain self-awareness (a ‘reflectiveness’, we might say with a somewhat tired pun) in a character, and they expose a distance, even separation between their inner worlds when they interact. In other words, Durrell has...
November 21, 2020
Things that happen in the mirror
21November
[Note: This post has been superseded by an updated and more integrated article.] ‘Mirror’ is one of Durrell’s words; mirrors are one of his images: they appear throughout the Alexandria tetralogy, in various functions. 1. When the narrator’s relationship with Melissa starts, her previous lover is jealous (to the point of following him around with a pistol in his coat). The two men fall into a...
November 14, 2020
Mirrors: metaphors of self-awareness
14November
When reading a book that uses poetic language, we might stumble from time to time over a sentence: though inconspicuous at first, still something about the metaphor seems not quite right. And closer inspection can then reveal a surprisingly deep idea behind a simple choice of phrase.
November 7, 2020
One famous and dangerous blur
07November
What is the difference between mysticism and a belief in magic?
October 31, 2020
On the acts of the golfing gods
31October
In the final round of the 2010 Masters golf tournament, two commentators were surprised, for a brief moment, about a mysteriously unsuccessful putting stroke. And then the replay revealed what really had happened.
October 24, 2020
Mirrors, self-knowledge, and running away from the party
24October
We might read the whole of Abenteuer as a gradual realization, on the part of the protagonist, of the consequences of running away from the party, i.e. losing the social connections that provide a route of self-knowledge (by way of others “holding up a mirror”).
October 17, 2020
The joys of Eigenbrötlertum
17October
The workings of our social environment are so close before our eyes that we often don’t even notice them; but many of them profoundly shape what we perceive as “reality”. It has proved fruitful to understand this along the lines of an analogy: social interactions share many characteristics with theatrical performances. Thus social interactions are enacted, as if on a stage, and “reality” is of...
October 10, 2020
The mirror and the mask
10October
What we see, when looking into the symbolic mirror, are those parts of ourselves which we would normally avoid to look at, and which we carefully also hide from others. These are part of the personal unconscious and make up, in Jungian terminology, our “shadow”. The false face that we show ourselves and the outside worlds (as long as we ignore the shadow), is called the “persona” (in the ancient...