Orts #969

- a book that changed my life -
a bunch of heartwarming and inspiring stories about books
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opinion/letters/influential-books.html


Having been is a form of being.
— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
 

When she [Mary Anne Evans, aka George Eliot] moved to London at the beginning of 1851, altering her name to Marian, she lodged at Chapman’s house on the Strand. She began to attend Francis Newman’s lectures on geometry at the newly opened Ladies College in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury—but it was probably Spinoza, not Newman, who suggested to her that living, changing human beings could be studied geometrically. She would encounter this insight in the spring of 1855, while translating Part III of the Ethics: here Spinoza begins his study of the emotions by declaring his intention to consider human feelings, actions, and appetites “as if the subject were lines, surfaces, or solids.”
     — Clare Carlisle, George Eliot Meets Spinoza, Lapham’s Quarterly, Jan.14, 2020                          https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/george-eliot-meets-spinoza