Tag Archives: literature

Hamnet and Tutankhamun

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Symbol Reader

Shakespeare’s life is a great mystery but we do know that he had a son, Hamnet, who died at the age 11, possibly from the plague. Four years after his son’s death, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, maybe his greatest masterpiece. In … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged afterlife, ancient Egypt, archetypes, art, burial, death, fiction, grave, Hamnet, Howard Carter, literature, Maggie O'Farrell, mask, Osiris, Shakespeare, symbolism, symbols, tomb, truth, Tutankhamun, Tutankhamun's mask | 4 Comments

The Innocent Weaving of Stories

Posted on May 31, 2020 by Symbol Reader

“To begin with, it is not true that the Gods dwell only in the Heavens, for all things are full of the Gods.” Iamblichus In this current season of Venus retrograde in Gemini I have been feeling a deep desire … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged archetypes, Arundhati Roy, Borges, collections, forty, Franz Schubert, Iamblichus, Istanbul, Jorge Luis Borges, literature, museums, novels, Orhan Pamuk, Osvaldo Ferrari, quarantine, songs, stories, storytelling, sunthemata, symbolism, symbols, the Museum of Innocence, Venus retrograde | 6 Comments

Little Women 2019: A Short Review

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Symbol Reader

Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, experienced both enchantment and wretched poverty in her early years. Her father was an intellectual and member of the Transcendentalist movement, which meant that little Louisa met Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo … Continue reading →

Posted in The Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Uncategorized | Tagged cinema, classicism, feminism, film, Greta Gerwig, literature, Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, movie, narrative, narrator, patriarchy, postmodernism, review, storytelling, suffrage | 8 Comments

“Blessed is he who leaves” – “Flights” by Olga Tokarczuk

Posted on July 8, 2018 by Symbol Reader

This year’s Man Booker international prize went to a Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk for Flights. It is an absorbing tale, or rather a collection of tales, devoted to the nomad in everyone of us. More than that, a large part … Continue reading →

Posted in Novel review, Uncategorized | Tagged Bieguni, body, book review, Flights, International Man Booker Prize, literature, nomads, Olga Tokarczuk, relics, symbolism, symbols, wanderers | 11 Comments

Fernando Pessoa – Weaver of the Soul

Posted on December 10, 2017 by Symbol Reader

“Weavers of despair, let us weave only shrouds – white shrouds for the dreams we never dreamed, black shrouds for the days when we die, grey shrouds for the gestures we only dreamed of, imperial purple shrouds for our futile … Continue reading →

Posted in Fernando Pessoa, Uncategorized | Tagged Book of Disquietude, confession, diary, Fernando Pessoa, heteronyms, literature, poetry, Soul | 18 Comments

The Swelling Sound of Beauty Arriving: The Writing of Elena Ferrante

Posted on April 27, 2017 by Symbol Reader

Two girls grow up in an impoverished neighbourhood in Naples. To merely describe them as friends would be an understatement, for they share a ferocious bond. It all started while they were playing with their dolls alongside each other: “We … Continue reading →

Posted in Elena Ferrante, Uncategorized | Tagged book review, Elena Ferrante, literature, My Brilliant Friend | 5 Comments

Like the Rainbow on the Waterfall: the Mystical Aura of Consumption

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Symbol Reader

While the fourteenth century was ravaged by the Black Death, the nineteenth century belonged to tuberculosis, or the White Death, a disease much more insidious and widespread. John Keats died of it at the age of twenty-six, and so did … Continue reading →

Posted in Tuberculosis | Tagged art, consumption, Davos, death, disease, Edgar AllanPoe, Hans Castorp, illness, John Keats, life, literature, Magic Mountain, myth, Romanticism, sanatorium, symbolism, TB, Thomas Mann, Tuberculosis, White Death | 6 Comments

Shakespeare and Goethe on Love: from Despair to Hope

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Symbol Reader

“She had a wildness in her eyes and into it I plunged.” Goethe, “Sorrows of Young Werther” In January 1778 Christel von Lassberg drowned herself in the river Ilm, the reason most probably being unrequited love. A copy of Goethe’s … Continue reading →

Posted in love, Uncategorized | Tagged bear, freezing, Goethe, hibernation, literature, love, passion, rebirth, regeneration, Romanticism, Shakespeare, spring, suffering, symbolism, symbols, trauma, Werther, Werther effect, winter, Winter's Tale | 10 Comments

Stamped on the Underside of My Memory

Posted on December 26, 2015 by Symbol Reader

“Every aurate woman I have loved in my life, and I use the word loved in its widest sense, has left her impression on me, as the old gods of creation are said to have left their thumbprints on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Quotations, Uncategorized | Tagged Ancient Light, John Banville, literature, memory, quotes, the unconscious | 9 Comments

“The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton

Posted on July 5, 2015 by Symbol Reader

“The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to … Continue reading →