Most Recent. In Arts & Letters – Spirituality.

Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Arthur Schopenhauer – The Thing Itself: The independence of music

Music is entirely independent of the phenomenal world, ignores it altogether, could to a certain extent exist if there was no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts. Thus music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is therefore by no means like the other arts, the copy...

Ingrid D. Rowland – He (Michelangelo) Made Stone Speak

If Michelangelo’s first biographers described his achievements as nothing short of divine, the man himself was beset throughout his life with mortal worries. They only increased with age. He was seventy-five when his protégé Giorgio Vasari described him in 1550 as sent down by Heaven to redeem art from its “endless futility,” “passionate but fruitless zeal, and the presumptuous opinions of mortals, more distant from truth than darkness from light.”...

Paul Collins – Vanishing Act

Barbara Newhall Follett was a prodigy who transfixed the literary world—and then vanished. In a New Hampshire apartment during the winter of 1923, this typewritten notice was fastened squarely against a closed door: Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking. The person in this room if he agrees that one shall come...

The Encounter That Revealed a Different Side of Emily Dickinson

After eight years of letter writing, the author Thomas Wentworth Higginson finally met the reclusive poet face-to-face. by Martha Ackmann “My dear young gentleman or young lady,” the essay in the April 1862 issue of The Atlantic began. Thomas Wentworth Higginson went on in “Letter to a Young Contributor” to offer advice to would-be writers seeking to publish. Use black ink and quality paper, and avoid sloppy dashes. That beginning line, with its two-word...