Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

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Emerson, it seemed to me, emphasized the vital things about spirituality, while discarding all its outworn trappings. Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. Books written by social media stars are often criticized for being cash grabs — and for good reason. Puschak explores the sociological, civic and health benefits of public benches in city planning, arguing for their necessity. In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Puschak, a graduate of Boston University’s film school, is at his best when critiquing film, art and literature. Otherwise, it will gradually get pulled into the quicksand of my consciousness, forgotten or folded into a mix of ill-considered motivations. Caring about something so deeply felt rebellious, and that’s the place where Emerson gave me permission to care.His closing essay provided me with a great amount of inspiration and insight into how to make progress on an artistic endeavor. I’ve been watching his videos on YouTube for the past 7 years (at least) so it made me happy that he published a full book. Here he dissects the blissfulness of sitting on a public bench in Barcelona, watching the world go by during the covid-19 pandemic. I've never felt so right, so welcomed and capable than after reading this first essay and I really want everyone to enjoy something similarly. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.

The word evokes iconic figures like Einstein, Beethoven, Picasso, and Steve Jobs, whose cultural contributions have irreversibly shaped society. While not every piece here pulled me in, the majority were thought-provoking, thorough, curious, and meaningful. So many of my professors at BU were obsessed with their subjects, and that enthusiasm was infectious. But his points, in “Self-Reliance” and elsewhere, are subtle enough to overcome their excesses and still be of great value to the modern reader.It is, in the words of David Foster Wallace, a dialogue between consciousnesses in the purest sense of the term. Drawing on ancient Stoic wisdom and examples across history and around the world, Ryan Holiday shows why courage is so important, and how to cultivate it in our own lives. If there’s a vein of sorrow in “Experience,” that’s because Emerson wrote it shortly after the death of his five-year-old son, Waldo, who succumbed to scarlet fever in 1842.

Here, Puschak attempts to decipher why Peter Jackson’s LOTR franchise holds up so well, deciding that it must be Puschak’s own “longing for reality as I want it to be”: a world where every person has been assigned a vital role in mythology, a place where all prophecies are fulfilled and where sacred objects are the stuff of destiny. I was probably the billionth eighteen-year-old to feel that way, the billionth bewildered teenager who left home for school, only to be shocked that the wider world didn’t operate the same way as Anytown, USA. So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls from me and leaves no scar. If you don't, you'll probably wish the author's lengthy college reminiscence stayed out of the Emerson break-down.Whether you're interested in the philosophy of Jerry Seinfeld or how Clark Kent is the real hero, there's something for everyone in this effervescent collection. A conversion from video essays to actual written essays was a natural leap for him to make and it's exactly what he did with his ever sharp and utterly personal debut collection Escape Into Meaning. Maybe he felt as vulnerable as I did, but spoke his truth nonetheless, believing it to be more valuable than a life without embarrassment. Just like Chuck Klosterman did with Pavement and Stephen Malkmus, Evan Puschak explored a relatable side to a guy who doesn’t necessarily want to come off as relatable. We should refuse to “capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions,” then prepare for a backlash to that refusal: “For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.

It’s amazing how different a class becomes when you’re not spending all your time scrawling notes, trying to sort out what will or won’t be relevant to some future exam. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as the colossal chisel of Phidias, or the trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. The Comforts of Cyberpunk (I don't necessarily like cyberpunk, but Puschak's reasoning is what got me agreeing with him. Even genius can be harmful if it over-influences, if I am knocked “clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. Emerson describes a hollow world of obsolete rules, where scholars squabble over inconsequential details of archaic texts, rather than seek revelations of their own.escape into/to something (figurative) As a child he would often escape into a dream world of his own. A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the Essays remained to me from my father’s library, when a boy. We’ll explore Lewis’s thoughts on everything from friendships to heaven, from the reasons for faith to the power of stories.