How to Cite These Archived Letters
Dear Colleague Archive 1987
| Date of Letter | Topic Summary | ID |
|---|---|---|
| 1987-January-01 | "Dependence—awareness of it makes us inclined to worship. Our greatest creations depend on an original insight that seems to come down to us from another Realm." |
27 |
| 1987-January-15 | On biology and intellectual pursuits. "The impersonality of creators is well known." | 28 |
| 1987-February-01 | On Singer and Yourcenar. "Being rooted means being concerned with externalities; being rootless means being concerned with one's own thought. | 29 |
| 1987-February-15 | "Ugliness is at the surface; underneath is beauty. This is a common theme in Western thought." | 30 |
| 1987-March-01 | "...the existence of strangers or a foreign culture is, in some ultimate sense, reassuring because it gives the local people a promise of renewal. Strangers, if they are not potential saviors, are at least potential sources of inspiration." | 31 |
| 1987-March-15 | Reflection on "on the human need to raise the curtain and to bring it down at the appropriate moment—in life as well as in the theatre." | 32 |
| 1987-April-01 | On George Santayana and tenure. | 33 |
| 1987-April-15 | "But good prose is also high artifice. As a sophisticated human product it demands its own place under the sun. Far from being transparent to reality it casts a shadow over it." | 34 |
| 1987-May-01 | "...you cannot claim to have acquired much insight into the different cultures until you have become a bit tongue-tied and lost a little of your facility for translation." | 35 |
| 1987-September-01 | "If we are resistant to the influence of good art, we are perhaps also resistant to the influence of trash..." | 36 |
| 1987-September-15 | Concerning the uses of discontinuity. | 37 |
| 1987-October-01 | "Chinese artists portray live birds and vigorous plants; their European counterparts do the same but, in addition, they depict still lives that show clear signs of decay." | 38 |
| 1987-October-15 | Views on repetition and individualism by Russian intellectuals Brodsky and Pasternak. | 39 |
| 1987-November-01 | On shadow and light in art. "In the West, light is contrasted with shadow or darkness. This has not been true of Chinese art in which Yin and Yang are symbolized by other means." | 40 |
| 1987-November-15 | "Adventures cannot be predicted: they are privileged moments." | 41 |
| 1987-December-01 | "In an academic milieu, we claim to value thinking highly. But do we?" | 42 |
| 1987-December-15 | With writing in modern life the "...past that no longer haunts because it is disentangled from the unreflectiveness of daily living to become texts that can be criticized..." | 43 |
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