Honeysuckle Walks
a literature & philosophy blog
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Slowness: Milan Kundera on pleasure and memory
At around 130 pages, Milan Kundera’s seventh novel Slowness (1995) is concise, unusual, and compelling.
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 …
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…
Jane Austen’s 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 tortured poet
The trope of the “tortured poet” is intriguing—it conveys the idea that meaningful art requires or is enhanced by anguish, torment…
Sin, sirens, and the irresistible allure of sound
“Square in your ship’s path are Sirens, crying beauty to bewitch men coasting by; woe to the innocent who hears that sound!”
John Keats’ negative capability
John Keats was an English Romantic poet who’s best known for his odes, like “Ode to a Nightingale.” Despite a short life…
The happiness machine and accepting life as it is
In 1957, Ray Bradbury published a captivating short story called “The Happiness Machine,” which takes us back to a time of…
The interconnectedness of the world and time: Insights from Siddhartha
“They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways […] All of them together was the stream of events…”
Old lessons on learning and wisdom from Siddhartha
Siddhartha is a beautifully written spiritual novel by Hermann Hesse about a Nepalese man's journey of self-discovery and search for…
A book and a beverage: Anthem and a layered latte
“I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.” - Ayn Rand
Book review: The Fountainhead
The Fountainhead (published in 1943) by Ayn Rand tells the story of Howard Roark, a talented and hardworking architect with strong convictions…
Toni Morrison on fiction’s limits & what’s worth writing
“Is it possible to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as it was to early…”
What novelists should strive for (according to Ayn Rand)
“It was Aristotle who said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because history represents things only…”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) was an influential German philosopher who, despite providing the foundation for much of modern philosophy, died in relative obscurity.