The sacred in life and the arts.
Zug Switzerland
Joined October 2012
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Having had a somnambulist partner who also wrestled snakes in their sleep, this is a fascinating survey of what people get up to at night (slanted at the darker side of those multiple activities)!
If I were voting for the best literary biography I have read, Wendy Moffat's life of E.M. Forster would win ...
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2011/0…
Nicholas Colloff retweeted
'It also offers a sense of possibility that shared, communal story can be reenergized and renewed if we find ways of allowing ourselves to carry over our childlike imagining into our adult lives' – read Nicholas Colloff 's insightful review of Peggy & the Fairy Knolls here:
Nicholas Colloff retweeted
Thanks to @ncolloff of Switzerland for this wonderful review of 'Peggy and the Fairy Knolls'. Full review at this link:
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2026/1…
A very fine, poetic coming-of-age novel that opens up spaces of imagination in which we can more fruitfully, and enduringly dwell. @aonghasphadraig
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2026/1…
Deeply enjoyable - as stories they work both at the level of the ordinarily ‘spooky’ whilst being informed with a genuine spiritual intelligence
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2025/1…
A new arrival - the fictional world of Carlos Castaneda - and the mythical world of a trickster embodied.
Don't give me the whole truth,
don't give me the sea for my thirst,
don't give me the sky when I ask for light,
but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote
as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing
and the wind a grain of salt.
Olav Hague
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/0…
An excellent biography of Robert Lax, an exceptional poet and a remarkable, saintly man whose poem cycle, Circus Days and Nights, inspired a fine opera by Phillip Glass.
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2015/1…
Having seen persons of importance being insufferable in the simple exchanges of life, good to share a flight with Christine Lagarde, and team, this evening from Bangkok and see simple gracious normality! And she writes notes in a notebook with a real pen!!! 😂
Happy anniversary to one of the greats -poet, novelist and, I think, one of the great masters of the short story: George Mackay Brown!
The first stars shone on him. I carried him down over the fields to the beach. We stood before a slow darkening heave of sea. A fleck of spindrift drifted on to his cheek. The wind had lain in the south-west since before his birth... George Mackay Brown, A Time to Keep. Born #OTD
Every so often check in on ‘recent’ Buber related publications - and on this occasion struck gold. Mendes-Flohr was the editor of the Complete Works and this is a treasury of multiple perspectives.
I wish we had a better descriptor for Buber describing him as a ‘philosopher’ can be misleading. The French ‘penseur’ might be simpler and better.
His professional post at the Hebrew University was in sociology but the running joke was that his students would have to learn their actual sociology elsewhere!
When Walpole died (too early) he was an immensely popular writer whose star has now faded. These stories are excellent: the touch of the macabre is accompanied by great, if saddening, psychological insight, narrative drive and descriptive power.
I enjoy the fact that Blackwood was virtually the first person broadcast on BBC TV. A brilliant short story writer sadly genre pigeoned. Metaphysically informed and psychologically acute.
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2025/1…
As my Jesuit philosophy tutor would remind us, you cannot read an ethics out of the Bible as if it were a self-help manual (or one for self-justification one). The Bible alone cannot decide whether capital punishment is right or wrong. Period.
Another writer, Frank Waters, who deserves a wider reputation than he has, he wrote a series of fine novels whose characters sit on multiple societal edges, and one, The Man Who Killed the Deer, is a minor masterpiece.
ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/1…
