Epiphany; Verse; and the idea of Justice

Today I learned about "epiphany" in the context of the short story. Interestingly, another word immediately came to mind upon hearing the word "epiphany": "eustress." "Eustress" came to mind because I had used it about a year ago when describing a sudden realization I had when reminiscing about a particular time and place in my past. Used primarily in endocrinological and psychological fields of study, eustress - in contrast to its opposite, distress - denotes "a positive form of stress," similar to the sensation one experiences during flow, a concept Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined and discussed eloquently in his groundbreaking work, Flow, on "optimal experience." The simultaneous sensation of joy and anxiety an athlete experiences when accomplishing a major feat or reaching his or her potential, for example, is symptomatic of eustress.

I have also been thinking of the study of ethics, a subject I have been intrigued by for many years, ever since college when I would browse journals on ethics in my college library as well as the free online collection available through my college's internal database. While reading these journal articles, I was introduced to a number of prominent moral philsophers, including Martha Nussbaum. When I read about her book Upheavals of Thought in a New York Times Book Review article entitled "The Philosophy of Love", I knew I had to go out and purchase it to see what it was all about. It took me almost a month to complete reading it, but Upheavals of Thought turned out to be one of the most thought-provoking, and one of the best, books I have ever read (Google Books has scanned copies of the Table of Contents and several pages of actual text, although some are omitted). Another author whose writing on ethics I have followed is Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen, whose work is discussed in The New York Times Magazine article I provided a link to in a recent blog entry. Amartya Sen has a new book out called The Idea of Justice that I would love to read. In the mean time I am reading reviews that have been published about the book, including reviews in The Financial Times and The Times Literary Supplement, to get some sense of the points and issues he raises in the book. I will return to the study of ethics in future blog entries.

As for other stuff I am reading as well as links I updated recently on this blog: I am currently listening to a podcast of Poetry magazine's July/August issue (I have read poetry only intermittedly, mostly from The New Yorker and The Paris Review, but I have always been fascinated by this literary artform); I have been reading the verse and short story sections of the Bartleby website, which I have provided a link to on this blog; and I posted a link to One Blog, a blog about the effort to alleviate extreme poverty in some of the world's most impoverished areas, on my blog. Bye for now.