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At no other time in history has man been more viciously assailed by information; some useful, but most of the unnecessary and even pernicious kind. Social media, international news headlines, odd facts of nature, politics, entertainment, sexual provocation, these things have fast become ubiquitous in Western life, flinging their chaotic forms in front of our eyes, desperate for our attention, our money, and our desire. A man does not have the capacity to keep each of these in

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — T.S. Eliot ,   Little Gidding One acquainted with the history of art and literature will surely be familiar with the movement loosely described as ‘modernism,’ the precursor to ‘post-modernism’. This movement (distinct from the heresy that my Catholic readership associates with the term), replaced much of what preceded it in the l

Graham Greene liked to poke at things, often to the detriment of those who took him or his characters at face value. Brighton Rock , a 1930s-set book written to be easily adaptable (which it later was), is one of those prodding works. The story centers around a sociopathic teenage gangster named Pinkie who is vying for control of Brighton's underworld after his mentor Kite is murdered . The plot follows his violent rise to power, his deceitful marriage to a young waitress nam

Thomas Hardy viscerally drags us through Victorian class struggle and the cross of an earnest, but gullible man One may have some familiarity with Thomas Hardy and his best-known work “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” which was published in 1891. Hardy, a British author and poet from Dorset, known for his rich prose, fatalist and comedic themes, firmly cements himself as one of England’s finest writers, offering a rich window into the pitfalls and—ultimately—the senselessness of in