Honeysuckle Walks
a literature & philosophy blog
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Notes from Underground: Dostoevsky on suffering and the will to live
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground instantly draws you in with its opening line, “I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.”
Book review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls opens with a poetic, dreamlike memory of the narrator lying beneath a twilight sky …
Memory and the illusion of time in Milan Kundera’s novels
Schopenhauer on aesthetics and the goal of art
Widely recognized as one of the world’s most pessimistic philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer is mainly known for his views on suffering.
Gustave Flaubert and the realist novel
Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880) was a French novelist who played a pivotal role in establishing fiction as a serious, respected genre. At the time, poetry was the predominant…
Nostalgia and the great return
Milan Kundera’s penultimate novel Ignorance is about two immigrants, Irena and Josef, who consider returning to their home countries after…
Fire as the arche of the world: Heraclitus’ fragments
Heraclitus was an ancient Greek philosopher who was born in Ephesus (modern day Turkey) in the 6th century BC. His ideas helped shape…
Schopenhauer on the human condition and original sin
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) was an influential German philosopher who, despite providing the foundation for much of modern philosophy, died in relative obscurity.
5 of the best philosophy-related books
Philosophers think about the most important questions in life–everything from how to face death gracefully…
Aristotle’s horror vacui and the vacuum law of prosperity
In her book Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, Catherine Ponder introduces various laws that govern reality. One of these is the vacuum law of prosperity…
Jane Austen and the era of virtue—and vice
At the heart of every Jane Austen novel lies a sharp critique of social values. This isn’t surprising…
Timeless quotes from Steppenwolf
In an author’s note for the 1961 edition of Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse described the novel as his most “violently misunderstood” work…
The philosophy of beauty
Nowadays, most people don’t attach a larger significance to beauty. At most, beauty is a quality that evokes pleasure…
Fear, mortality, and authenticity
“To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive…”
Mimetic desire and immortality
Desire is like an eternal flame. We go through life stoking it—we want a better job, to live in a nicer house, to be fitter or prettier…
The art of imitation
Imitation is a natural part of human learning and development. While it’s often avoided out of fear of unoriginality or plagiarism…
Seneca on anger
Anger is like stepping into quicksand. The angrier you get, the more damage you inflict upon yourself; just as the more…
Milan Kundera and the ideal form of love
A core focus of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is love, and it raises questions about what…
Nietzsche’s eternal return
Friedrich Nietzsche claimed his doctrine of eternal return was his most important idea, the “greatest elevation of the consciousness…
The tortured poet
The trope of the “tortured poet” is intriguing—it conveys the idea that meaningful art requires or is enhanced by anguish, torment…