“You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.”
― Joseph Campbell
Happy Friday Subscribers.
It’s that time of the week when I throw out a few book recommendations. This week’s theme: “The Art of Living.” These are some of the best books that I’ve read concerning the ultimate question— “How should one live?”
How does one live a good life? A creative life? How does one cope with the fear of death? How does one carve out a unique and honorable existence in the face of it all? How does one become fully human?
Below are a few of my favorite books that tackle these important questions.
At the bottom, I have a short list of books I’m currently reading.
Let’s go!
1. Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
From Amazon: Celebrated scholar Joseph Campbell shares his intimate and inspiring reflections on the art of living in this beautifully packaged book, part of a new series to be based on his unpublished writings.
A Passage:
"We must be willing to get rid of
the life we’ve planned, so as to have
the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed
before the new one can come.
If we fix on the old, we get stuck.
When we hang onto any form,
we are in danger of putrefaction.
Hell is life drying up."
2. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
From Amazon: How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How do you live? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern individual. He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, unlike anything written before. More than four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment —and in search of themselves. Just as they will to this spirited and singular biography.
3. Meditations: A New Translation by Marcus Aurelius
From Amazon: Few ancient works have been as influential as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and emperor of Rome (A.D. 161–180). A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, it remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. Marcus’s insights and advice—on everything from living in the world to coping with adversity and interacting with others—have made the Meditations required reading for statesmen and philosophers alike, while generations of ordinary readers have responded to the straightforward intimacy of his style. For anyone who struggles to reconcile the demands of leadership with a concern for personal integrity and spiritual well-being, the Meditations remains as relevant now as it was two thousand years ago.
4. Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag
From Amazon: Hiking with Nietzsche is about defeating complacency, balancing sanity and madness, and coming to grips with the unobtainable. As Kaag hikes, alone or with his family, but always with Nietzsche, he recognizes that even slipping can be instructive. It is in the process of climbing, and through the inevitable missteps, that one has the chance, in Nietzsche’s words, to “become who you are."
A Passage:
“As it turns out, to ‘become who you are’ is not about finding a ‘who’ you have always been looking for. It is not about separating ‘you’ off from everything else. And it is not about existing as you truly ‘are’ for all time. The self does not lie passively in wait for us to discover it. Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process, in the German verb werden, 'to become'.”
5. How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
From Amazon: Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work.
Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.
Currently Reading:
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As Metaphor and As Religion by Joseph Campbell
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost Mereloo
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Happy reading, folks. Hope you all have a great weekend. Cheers till next time.
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