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A brilliant French poet born in 1854 who wrote his best known works in his late teens before giving up writing at the age of 21, due to the end of a love affair with poet Paul Verlain. Rimbaud died in 1891 at the age of 37, soon after the amputation of his right leg. He is best know for his poem The Drunken Boat, written at the age of 17.
"Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life."
Arthur Rimbaud
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An anonymously written Russian book based in the 1800's about a about a very sweet, humble, selfless guy who goes on a pilgrimage after loosing his wife and farm. He reads the Bible constantly and wants to know what it means in Thessalonians when it says "pray without ceasing". So he sets out to find a teacher who will teach him how to pray incessantly and why. After walking for weeks and weeks the man finally finds an old monk who tells him that the prayer God really wants to hear is The Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me). The monk tells him how to repeat the prayer without ceasing and after practicing the pilgrim masters it. He says the prayer silently to himself over and over, when he's talking to others, reading, and even sleeping. To stop saying it causes him great unhappiness and pain after a while because it's become a part of him. The point of the book is to awaken the world to the benefits of saying the prayer to yourself constantly. "Enlightenment is supposed to come with the prayer, not before it. The idea, really, is that sooner or later, completely on its own, the prayer moves from the lips and the head down to a center in the heart and becomes an automatic function in the person, right along with the heartbeat."
The little pilgrim reads the Philokalia constantly in The Way of a Pilgrim.
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Probably the greatest writer in American history. 89 year old Salinger had many stories published in The New Yorker but has had only four books published; The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. His last work published was Hapworth 16, 1924 in The New Yorker in 1965. His last interview was in 1980 and since then he has become sort of a recluse and lives a quite life in New Hampshire. Salinger almost always writes about young, very intelligent and cynical people and his work appeals greatly to a younger audience because of his theme of loss of innocence and adolescent alienation.
I think for the past 40 years J. D. Salinger has been working on a huge masterpiece that will be published when he dies and blow us all away.
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