Most Recent. In Arts & Letters – Spirituality.

Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Dylan J. Montanari-An Alternative Common Sense: Notes on Carlo Michelstaedter’s Philosophy

ON OCTOBER 17, 1910, a young man took his life with two pistol shots, having recently completed an ambitious thesis in philosophy, Persuasion and Rhetoric, which would become one of the least read masterpieces of 20th-century thought. The young man’s name was Carlo Michelstaedter. At the time of his death, he was 23. In English-speaking circles, Michelstaedter remains virtually unknown over a century after his death. Unsurprisingly, his suicide looms large...

Valentina Di Liscia-Images of 100,000 Artworks From Paris Museum Collections Now Freely Available to the Public

Paris Musées is offering digital downloads of masterpieces by artists including Rembrandt, Gustave Courbet, and Eugène Delacroix. Paris Musées announced yesterday that it is now offering 100,000 digital reproductions of artworks in the city’s museums as Open Access — free of charge and without restrictions — via its Collections portal. Paris Musées is a public entity that oversees the 14 municipal museums of Paris, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la...

Mark Scroggins-The Monumental and Human Poetry of Paul Valéry

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot wrote of the literary canon as an “order of monuments.” A lot of unwelcome monuments — of Robert E. Lee, Christopher Columbus, and others — have come down recently, but the de-platforming of literary eminences has been going on for some years now: Eliot himself, who once bestrode the Anglophone scene like some Colossus of Rhodes, now seems...