William James on Consciousness and the Four Features of Transcendent Experiences

by Maria Popova

“Queer, in fact maddening, to think that ‘beauty’ in nature is for us alone: for the human eye alone. Without our consciousness it doesn’t exist,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in her journal. “All of nature, all of the given ‘world,’ is in fact a work of art. Only the human consciousness can register it.” Four decades earlier, Virginia Woolf had recorded the selfsame sentiment in what remains the most stunning passage from her own journal; four decades later, neuroscientist Christof Koch would echo the sentiment in the unsentimental chamber of science: “Without consciousness there is nothing… Consciousness is the central fact of your life.”

The Forgotten Political Genius of Philip Roth

The late writer feared real life was stranger, and more interesting, than fiction could capture, yet his own novels brilliantly pilloried our political absurdities.

By DAVID GREENBERG

he American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality,” the novelist Philip Roth wrote in an essay called “Writing American Fiction,” published in Commentary magazine in early 1961. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” Name-dropping various 1950s scandal artists, Roth added, “Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? Sherman Adams and Bernard Goldfine?”