John Steinbeck Profile

John Steinbeck Profile

Feb 15, 2024 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Writers

Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of acclaimed author and local writer John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Much of Steinbeck’s fiction is set in Central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and Monterey Bay area, which is near where we live. Steinbeck’s works often explored themes of fate and injustice, especially among the poor and downtrodden.

John Ernst Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California. His father served as Monterey County Treasurer, and his mother was a schoolteacher, who had a passion for reading and writing. Steinbeck grew up in a small, rural valley along the Pacific coast. Both the valley and coast would later serve as settings for some of his most well-known novels.

When he was growing up, Steinbeck spent his summers working on nearby ranches, such as the Post Ranch in Big Sur. In 1919, Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School. He then enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied English literature, although he never finished his degree.

In 1925, Steinbeck traveled to New York City, where he took odd jobs and started writing fiction, although he failed to get anything published. In 1928, he returned to California and worked as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met the woman who became his wife. Steinbeck continued writing, and in 1929, his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published. It is the story of a swashbuckling pirate, who ruled the Spanish Main with his vicious outlaw activity.

In 1930, Steinbeck married Carol Henning in Los Angeles. Steinbeck attempted to earn a living by manufacturing plaster mannequins with friends, but this didn’t turn out to be a successful business venture, and they ran out of money six months later. Steinbeck and Henning moved back to Pacific Grove, where they lived in a cottage owned by his father just outside of Monterey. Henning became the model for the character Mary Talbot in Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row.

Steinbeck’s parents gave him free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and loans that allowed him to write without having to look for work. The couple lived on fish and crabs gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from their garden, but still their money ran out. Then they lived on welfare, and “on rare occasions” they stole bacon from the local market.

Around this time, Steinbeck wrote a mystery novel called Murder at Full Moon, about a dangerous werewolf that was on the loose. Publishers rejected this book, and it remains unpublished to this day, as Steinbeck’s estate doesn’t want it released, despite pleas from many people who are eager to read it.

Between 1930 and 1933, Steinbeck produced three shorter works, The Pastures of Heaven, The Red Pony, and To a God Unknown. During this time, Steinbeck was a relatively obscure writer with little success, although he “never doubted that he would achieve greatness.”

During this period, Steinbeck met marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor. Ricketts operated a biology lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of marine animals, and he became a proponent of ecological thinking. They shared a love of music and art, and the two had a deep bond. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him.

In 1935, Steinbeck published his novel Tortilla Flat, which was his first critical success, and won the California Commonwealth Club’s Gold Medal. The novel portrays the adventures of a group of poor, yet loyal friends, living in the Monterey region during the post-World War I era. The story focuses on their simple lives, camaraderie, and escapades, which were creatively expressed within the mythic structure of an Arthurian legend.

Next, Steinbeck began writing what was to become one of his most widely acclaimed novels, Of Mice and Men, which was published in 1937. This is a drama about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California, and it was adapted into a Hollywood film two years later, starring Lon Chaney Jr.

In 1939, Steinbeck followed this wave of success with the publication of his novel The Grapes of Wrath, which is often considered to be his greatest work. Set during the Great Depression, it’s the story of a poor family of farm workers who leave Oklahoma for California. It was controversial at the time that it was published, and from 1939 to 1941, it was banned in certain California public schools, because the Kern County Board of Supervisors claimed that it was obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county.

However, The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, as well as being prominently cited when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. In 1940, The Grapes of Wrath was adapted as a Hollywood film, directed by John Ford, and starring Henry Fonda, who was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for the role. In 1942, Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flat was also adapted into a movie, starring Spencer Tracy. With some of the proceeds from this, Steinbeck built a summer ranch home in Los Gatos, California.

In 1945, Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row was published. The novel, set in Monterey, also took place during the Great Depression. The story revolves around people living along a street with sardine canneries known as Cannery Row” The actual location that Steinbeck was writing about was named Ocean View Avenue at the time that he wrote the novel, but it was later renamed Cannery Row in honor of the book. A film version of Cannery Row was released in 1982, and a stage version in 1995.

During the last years of his life, Steinbeck remained an active and prolific writer, despite battling health issues. He continued to produce several notable works, including Travels with Charley: In Search of America, which chronicled his cross-country road trip with his poodle, Charley. Steinbeck also wrote America and Americans, a collection of essays that explored various aspects of American society and culture.

Steinbeck was also involved in political activism, speaking out against social injustices, and advocating for workers’ rights. Despite his declining health, Steinbeck’s literary contributions and commitment to addressing important societal issues continued until his passing. Steinbeck died in 1968, in New York City, at the age of 66.

Steinbeck’s boyhood home in Salinas is preserved and is open for tours. Nearby in Salinas is the National Steinbeck Center, a museum and memorial dedicated to Steinbeck, which was founded in 1983. In 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger inducted Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame. Today, when driving along U.S. Route 101 through Salinas, a large green sign announces that one is driving along the John Steinbeck Highway.

Some of the quotes that John Steinbeck is known for include:

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen. 

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. 

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness? 

A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ. 

You’ve seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it’s an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? 

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found. 

To be alive at all is to have scars. 

When two people meet, each one is changed by the other, so you’ve got two new people.

by David Jay Brown

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Joseph Campbell Profile

Joseph Campbell Profile

Jun 5, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Writers

Carolyn and I have appreciated the work of literature professor, author, and mythologist Joseph Campbell, who is recognized today as being one of the most influential experts on mythology.

Joseph John Campbell was born in White Plains, New York in 1904. His father was a hosiery importer and wholesaler, and he was raised in an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family, with a younger brother.

When Campbell was seven years old, his father took him and his brother to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which made a great impression on him. Campbell “became fascinated, seized, obsessed, by the figure of a naked American Indian with his ear to the ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special knowledge in his eyes.”

As a result of this experience, Campbell became extremely interested in Native American culture. By the time he was ten years old, Campbell had read every book on American Indians in the children’s section at his local library and began devouring the books on the subject in the adult section.

In 1921, Campbell graduated from the Canterbury School in Connecticut and initially studied biology and mathematics at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, although he later switched to the humanities, and transferred to Columbia University in New York, where he excelled.

In 1924, after traveling to Europe with his family on a steamship, on the return voyage, he met philosopher and spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti aboard the ship, and they discussed Indian philosophy. This began a friendship between the two; they stayed in touch for five years, and this had a profound influence on Campbell, sparking his interest in Eastern philosophy and Hindu thought.

In 1925 Campbell graduated with a degree in English literature from Columbia University, and then in 1927, he earned a master’s degree in medieval literature from the school. Later that year Campbell received a fellowship from Columbia University to study in Europe, where he studied Old French Provencal and Sanskrit at the University of Paris and the University of Munich.

From 1929 to 1934 Campbell lived in a cabin in Woodstock, New York, where he engaged in an intensive and rigorous independent study. During these years he generally read for nine hours a day, although he traveled to California for a year, between 1931 and 1932, where he became close friends with writer John Steinbeck.

In 1934, Campbell accepted a position as professor of Literature at Sara Lawrence College in New York. Then, in 1938, Campbell married one of his former students, dancer-choreographer Jean Erdman, and they lived together in a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City for 49 years. In the 1980s they purchased a second apartment in Honolulu, and they divided their time between Hawaii and New York.

In 1943 Campbell coauthored the book Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial. This book takes its title from the symbolic creation legend of the Navaho people, which they incorporated into their blessing ceremony for tribe members headed to battle, and the book explores how this rite influenced Native Americans during World War II when they were for the first time drafted into the U.S. military.

In 1949 Campbell’s best-known book was published, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The book was published to wide acclaim and brought him numerous awards and honors. In this study of the myth of the hero, Campbell proposes the existence of a “monomyth” (a word coined by James Joyce), or “a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales in every culture.” This book has had a major influence on generations of creative artists, from abstract expressionists in the 1950s to contemporary filmmakers today.

Between 1955 and 1956, Campbell traveled to Asia for the first time and spent months in India and Japan. This had a profound influence on his thinking about Asian religion and myth, and it inspired him to want to teach comparative mythology to a larger audience.

Campbell authored numerous books on mythology, including The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology in 1959, Oriental Mythology in 1962, Occidental Mythology in 1964, and Creative Mythology in 1968. In 1972 he published Myths to Live By, and in 1986 his book The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion was released. Campbell was also a prolific editor. Some of the many books he edited included Alan Watts’ Myth and Ritual in Christianity and The Portable Jung, with work by psychologist Carl Jung.

Campbell also widely lectured, and starting in 1965, he led workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur for many years. In 1972, Campbell retired from Sarah Lawrence College, after having taught there for 38 years.

In 1985, Campbell was awarded the National Arts Club Gold Medal of Honor in Literature. At the award ceremony, James Hillman said, “No one in our century— not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Lévi-Strauss— has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our everyday consciousness.”

In 1987 Campbell died at his home in Hawaii and is buried in Honolulu.

Before his death, Campbell completed filming a series of interviews with Bill Moyers that aired on PBS in 1988 as The Power of Myth, and much interest in his work followed the airing of this popular series. The series discusses mythological, religious, and psychological archetypes, and a book, The Power of Myth, containing expanded transcripts of their conversations, was released shortly after the original broadcast. Millions of viewers were introduced to Campbell’s ideas by the broadcast, which was composed of six hours of conversation that the two men had videotaped over the course of several years.

In 1991, Campbell’s widow Jean Erdman worked with others to create the Joseph Campbell Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving, protecting, and perpetuating Campbell’s mythological work.

Hollywood filmmaker George Lucas has also credited Campbell’s influence. Following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, he stated that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell’s. Many other filmmakers have acknowledged the influence of Campbell’s work on their films, including Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood screenwriter, who created a company memo based on Campbell’s work, A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which led to the development of Disney’s 1994 film The Lion King.

Some of the quotes that Joseph Campbell is known for include:

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.

by David Jay Brown

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Fyodor Dostoevsky Profile

Fyodor Dostoevsky Profile

May 30, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Writers

Carolyn and I have long enjoyed the writings of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who wrote many great novels, short stories, and essays during his lifetime. His powerful works explore the human condition in 19th-century Russia, and they engage with a variety of timeless philosophical and spiritual themes.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1821. He had an older brother, his father was a doctor, and he was raised in his family’s home, which was on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. This hospital was in a lower-class district on the edges of Moscow, and when playing in the hospital gardens as a child Dostoevsky encountered patients who were at the bottom of the Russian social scale.

When Dostoyevsky was four years old his mother used the Bible to teach him how to read and write, and he was introduced to books at an early age. His nanny read him fairy tales, legends, and heroic sagas, and his parents introduced him to a wide range of literature. Although his father’s approach to education has been described as “strict and harsh,” Dostoevsky reported that his “imagination” was “brought alive” by his parent’s nightly readings.

In 1837 Dostoyevsky left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, and after graduating he worked as a lieutenant engineer and book translator, from French into Russian. In 1839 signs of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy first appeared, and his seizures plagued him throughout his life. During his 20s, Dostoyevsky recorded several journal descriptions of his seizures, and there are also descriptions in his novels. There have been numerous medical hypotheses about the type of epilepsy with which Dostoevsky suffered, the most notorious feature of his type of epilepsy being the so-called “ecstatic aura.” While these seizures were debilitating, they also appear to have contributed to mystical experiences that enhanced the creativity of his writing.

Dostoyevsky had this to say about his epileptic seizures, “I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I attained God and was imbued with him… all the joys life can give I would not take in exchange for it… for a few moments before the fit, I experience a feeling of happiness such [that] it is impossible to imagine in a normal state and which other people have no idea of. I feel entirely in harmony with myself and the world, and this feeling is so strong and so delightful that for a few seconds of such bliss, one would gladly give up ten years of one’s life if not one’s whole life.”

Between 1844 and 1845 Dostoyevsky wrote his first novel, Poor Folk. His motivation for writing this novel was said to be largely financial. Dostoyevsky was having financial difficulties, due to an extravagant lifestyle and a gambling addiction, so he decided to write a novel to try and raise funds. The novel is written in the form of letters between the two main characters, who are poor relatives, and it describes the lives of poor people, their relationship with rich people, and poverty in general. This novel became a commercial success, and it gained Dostoyevsky’s entry into Saint Petersburg’s literary circles.

In 1846 Dostoyevsky’s second novel, The Double: A Petersburg Poem, about a bureaucrat struggling to succeed, was published in a journal and it received negative reviews. Around this time Dostoyevsky also published several short stories in a magazine, which also received negative reviews, and this caused him stress and greater financial difficulty. After this his health declined, his seizures increased in frequency, and Dostoyevsky’s life took a dark turn.

In 1847 Dostoyevsky was arrested for belonging to a particular literary group called the Petrashevsky Circle, which discussed banned books that were critical of Tsarist Russia. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death, but at the last moment, his sentence was commuted. He later described this experience, of what he believed to be the last moments of his life, in his novel The Idiot. Dostoyevsky spent the next four years doing hard labor in a Siberian prison camp, where he had frequent seizures, and then after surviving that, he had to do six more years of compulsory military service.

In the years that followed Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist, editing several magazines, and he traveled around Western Europe. For a time, he experienced such serious financial hardship that he had to beg for money. In 1866, when he owed large sums of money to creditors, his widely acclaimed novel Crime and Punishment was first published in a literary journal, in twelve monthly installments. It was a “literary sensation” of 1866 and is now one of the most widely read books of all time.

The novel is about the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of an impoverished young man who plans to kill an unscrupulous old woman, who stores money and valuable objects in her apartment. What’s so remarkable about this story is how Dostoyevsky portrays the psychological process of his self-tormented main character.

Between 1868 and 1869 Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot was first published serially in a journal. The title of the book is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, a young, Christ-like, epileptic prince whose “goodness, open-hearted simplicity, and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight.”

In 1880 Dostoyevsky published his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, a passionate and philosophical story about rival love affairs, that explores questions of God, free will, and morality. Dostoevsky’s body of work consists of thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, 221 Diary articles, and numerous other works.

Dostoyevsky died in 1881. Since his death, he has become one of the most widely-read and highly-regarded Russian writers. Dostoyevsky’s books have been translated into more than 170 languages, they’ve served as the inspiration for numerous films, and his work has influenced many other writers.

In 1971, Dostoevsky’s former apartment in Saint Petersburg was opened as a museum, known as the F.M. Dostoevsky Memorial Museum. The apartment was Dostoevsky’s home during the composition of some of his most notable works, including The Double: A Petersburg Poem and The Brothers Karamazov. The museum library holds around 24,000 volumes and a small collection of manuscripts.

Some quotes that Fyodor Dostoyevsky is remembered for include:

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

Beauty will save the world.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

by David Jay Brown

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Nikos Kazantzakis Profile

Nikos Kazantzakis Profile

Apr 5, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Interviews, Writers

Upon Carolyn’s recommendation, I recently watched the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, which I greatly enjoyed. The movie was based on the novel by Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who Carolyn has raved about for years. Kazantzakis has written many other critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction and is remembered today as one of Greece’s greatest writers.

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in 1883 in Heraklion, the capital city of Crete, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Kazantzakis was the eldest of four children. His father was a farmer and animal feed dealer, who was described as “unsociable,” while his mother was described as “saintly.”

From 1902 to 1906 Kazantzakis studied law at the University of Athens and he graduated with honors. In 1907 he went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study philosophy. In Paris, he was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the idea that “a true understanding of the world comes from the combination of intuition, personal experience, and rational thought.” Kazantzakis’ 1909 doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne was on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and upon returning to Greece he began translating works of philosophy.

In 1906 Kazantzakis published his first work, an essay titled The Disease of the Century, which was published by Picture Gallery Magazine. That same year Kazantzakis also published his first book, The Serpent and Lily. Both the essay and the book were written under the pen name “Karma Nirvami,” which was one of the pseudonyms that Kazantzakis used during the first few years of his writing. His first play, Daybreak, was staged several months later at the Athenian Theater in Athens, and in 1909 he wrote a one-act play about existential themes called The Comedy.

Through the next several decades Kazantzakis traveled extensively throughout the world. He traveled around Greece and much of Europe— including Germany, Italy, France, The Netherlands, and Romania— as well as northern Africa, Egypt, Russia, Japan, and China. These travels put Kazantzakis in contact with different philosophies, ideologies, and lifestyles that would later influence his writing, as he often used his experiences to create vivid settings and characters in his works.

In 1919, Kazantzakis was appointed as the director general of the Greek Ministry of Public Welfare, although he only held this post for a year before resigning. However, during his service, he helped to feed and rescue over 150,000 Greek war victims.

In 1924 Kazantzakis first met Eleni Samiou, who was 21 years old at the time, and who devoted her life to helping Kazantzakis with his work. They began a romantic relationship around four years later, although they weren’t formally married until 1945. Samiou helped Kazantzakis by typing his drafts, commenting on his drafts before they were published, accompanying him on his travels, and managing his business affairs. They were married until his death.

In 1924 Kazantzakis also began working on an epic poem that was based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” which he retold from a contemporary perspective. Kazantzakis considered this to be his most important work. After fourteen years of writing and revision, it was finally published in 1938 as The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel.

Kazantzakis also wrote several books about his own interpretation of Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy, such as “The Saviors of God,” a series of spiritual exercises that he wrote between 1922 and 1923 and was first published in 1927. “The Saviors of God” is today widely considered to be his greatest work of philosophy. It incorporates elements from Bergson, Marx, and Nietzsche, as well as Christianity and Buddhism.

Facing financial difficulty in 1934, to earn money Kazantzakis wrote three textbooks for the second and third grades. The Greek Ministry of Education adopted one of them and his financial concerns were alleviated for a time.

In the following years, Kazantzakis wrote some of his most acclaimed works, which established him as a major Modern Greek writer. In 1946 his most famous novel, Zorba the Greek, was published. The novel beautifully contrasts the sensual and intellectual facets of human nature. It is a transformative story of a young writer who ventures off to escape his bookish, intellectual life, with the unexpected aid of a charismatic and boisterous, passionate, and mysterious peasant and musician named Alexis Zorba. The novel was adapted into the wonderful 1964 film starring Anthony Quinn that I mentioned earlier, and it won three Academy Awards.

Kazantzakis was spiritually inclined, but he had some issues with his Greek Orthodox Christian faith. As a child, he was baptized within the Greek Orthodox tradition, and he was drawn to the stories of saints. Many scholars and critics say that his works center on a search for spiritual and religious truth. Kazantzakis was exposed to different religious belief systems, like Buddhism, during his travels, influencing him to doubt his Christian faith. Although he never denied it, his criticism of Christianity caused tension within the Greek Orthodox Church and with his critics. In 1948 Kazantzakis wrote The Last Temptation of Christ and Christ Recrucified, his most controversial works, which are about questioning Christian values. The Last Temptation of Christ was condemned by the Catholic Church and was not published until 1956.

Kazantzakis’s novel Report to Greco was written in 1945, but not published until 1961. It’s an autobiographical work, and it explores Kazantzakis’s spiritual quest and his search for what he called a “new man.” In 1949 he wrote The Greek Passion, a play set during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22. Kazantzakis traveled extensively throughout this period, spending time in France, Austria, Italy, Germany, and the United States.

In 1953 Kazantzakis published The Greek Passion, which is a novel about a village’s struggle to cope with the Greek Civil War. Kazantzakis was also a prolific translator, translating works by Dante, Shakespeare, and many other writers into the Modern Greek language. He translated a number of notable works including The Divine Comedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Origin of Species, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

In addition to his widely acclaimed novels, memoirs, philosophical essays, and translations, Kazantzakis also wrote travel books and he lectured widely. Kazantzakis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for nine different years but never won. In 1957 he lost the Prize to Albert Camus by a single vote. Camus later said that Kazantzakis deserved the honor “a hundred times more” than himself. 

Kazantzakis died in 1957, in Germany, after a return flight from Asia. He is buried in Crete, at the highest point of the Walls of Heraklion, the Martinengo Bastion, which looks out over the mountains and the Sea of Crete. Kazantzakis’ epitaph reads: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

In 1968 Eleni Samiou published a biography of her husband— Nikos Kazantzakis— The Uncompromising — which contains the story of Nikos’ life and a large number of their letters.

In 2007 a euro collectors’ coin, the €10 Euro Greek Nikos Kazantzakis commemorative coin, was minted for the 50th anniversary of his death. His image is on the obverse of the coin, while the reverse carries the National Emblem of Greece with his signature. In 2017, on the 60th anniversary of his death, the €2 Euro Greece Grecia with his image was also minted.

In 2022, 65 years after the death of Kazantzakis, fans of his work rejoiced, when his final novel Aniforos was first published. The manuscript had been kept at the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum in the author’s home village of Mirtia, Crete since its rediscovery. Aniforos was written right after Zorba the Greek in 1946, and is filled with autobiographical references and reflections on his firsthand experience of World War II.

Some of the quotes that Nikos Kazantzakis is known for include:

God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises.

The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.

A man needs a little madness, or else… he never dares cut the rope and be free.

You can knock on a deaf man’s door forever.

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.

I said to the almond tree, ‘Sister, speak to me of God.’ And the almond tree blossomed.

You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.

Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.

by David Jay Brown

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D.H. Lawrence Profile

D.H. Lawrence Profile

Apr 3, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Profiles, Writers

When I first met Carolyn in the early 1980s, one of the writers that we passionately discussed was British novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence. We had both enjoyed his novels and been inspired by his sensual writings.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. His father was a barely literate coal miner and his mother was a schoolteacher. Nottinghamshire was a coal-mining town, and Lawrence’s working-class background influenced his writings.

From 1891 to 1898 Lawrence attended a boarding school in Eastwood that is today named in his honor: D.H. Lawrence Primary School. Lawrence was the first local student to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. Lawrence had a great love of books while he was young and throughout his life.

From 1902 to 1906 Lawrence worked as a schoolteacher in Eastwood. It was around this time that he began writing his first poems and short stories. In 1907 Lawrence won a short story competition, and he began working on a draft for his first novel. Lawrence enrolled as a full-time student at the University of London in 1908 and he earned a teaching certificate there.

For a while, Lawrence both taught and submitted his writings for publication to some of the literary journals of the time. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911. The novel explored the theme of love triangles and the damage associated with mismatched marriages. The book received generally positive reviews, and that same year Lawrence quit his teaching position in order to be able to write full-time.

In 1912 Lawrence met the woman who he was to share his life with, Frieda Weekley, and although she was already married when they first met, they eloped and left England for Germany. Once in Germany Lawrence was arrested and accused of being a British spy, although, thanks to an intervention by Frieda’s father, he was released.

That same year, the Lawrences walked from Germany, across the Alps, to Italy. This magnificent journey, with sights of incredible beauty, and Lawrence’s impressions of the Italian countryside, were recorded in the first of Lawrence’s travel books, Twilight in Italy. During his time in Italy, Lawrence completed his novel Sons and Lovers, and he also spent time with his good friend Aldous Huxley. Lawrence’s novel, about the emotional conflicts associated with suffocating relationships and the realities of working-class life, was published in 1913 and received positive reviews.

While in Italy, Lawrence also wrote the draft of a manuscript that was eventually divided into two of his best-known novels, The Rainbow, published in 1915, and Women in Love, published in 1920 as a sequel. In both of these novels, lesbian characters play prominent roles, and the novels were considered highly controversial when they were published. They were initially banned in the United Kingdom for obscenity. In 1922 the Lawrences moved to the United States and settled in Taos, New Mexico.

Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was first published privately in 1928, in Italy, and in 1929 in France. The story is about a young, married, upper-class woman who has an affair with her working-class gamekeeper, and the novel revolves around the theme that love can happen purely from physical expression.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover wasn’t openly published until 1960 when it became the subject of an obscenity trial in the United Kingdom for its depiction of sexual intimacy and its use of forbidden language. It was initially banned in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan. Lawrence’s publisher won the obscenity trial in the United Kingdom, three million copies of the book were quickly sold, and the bans was subsequently lifted around the world.

Lawrence’s work, opinions, and artistic preferences, were highly controversial during his lifetime, and there were many people who didn’t like what he was writing; as a result, he endured quite a bit of persecution and much misrepresentation of his work. Many critics viewed his erotic writings as pornography. However, although Lawrence’s depictions of sexuality were seen as shocking at the time that they were published, they seem rather tame by today’s standards.

There is also a deeper, almost mystical philosophy underlying Lawrence’s novels that many of his early critics missed. The leading characters in his most controversial novels go through rebirth experiences, and they grow into more fulfilling versions of themselves. Also, according to Lawrence, “the journey into the unconscious is accomplished through sensual experience.” This is an important theme for Lawrence. He urges us to explore the impulses and desires of the unconscious in order to find our deeper selves. Lawrence didn’t trust the intellect because he believed that the mind distorts reality, and that bodily sensations are more concrete and thus more real.

Lawrence also wrote five screenplays and nearly 800 poems in his lifetime. He had a lifelong interest in painting as well, and this became his main form of creative expression during his final years. In 1929 Lawrence’s paintings were exhibited at the Warren Gallery in London and the show was extremely controversial. Over 12,000 people attended, and after some people complained about the artwork, the police seized thirteen of the twenty-five paintings. Lawrence was able to get the paintings back— but only under the condition that he never exhibit them in England ever again. Lawrence’s paintings are now housed in a hotel in Taos, and in Austin at the University of Texas.

Lawrence died young, in 1930, at the age of 44, and he was buried in Taos. Since 2008, an annual D. H. Lawrence Festival has been organized in his hometown of Eastwood, to celebrate his life and works.

Some of the quotes that D.H. Lawrence is known for include:

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.

by David Jay Brown

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Robert Anton Wilson Interview

Robert Anton Wilson Interview

Mar 30, 2023 | David Jay Brown, Interviews, Writers

Carolyn and I have enjoyed our friendship with, and have been inspired by the late author and philosopher Robert (Bob) Anton Wilson.

Bob is the author of over 35 popular fiction and nonfiction books, dealing with such themes as our future evolution, unexplained phenomena, synchronicity, the occult, quantum mechanics, altered states of consciousness, the nature of belief systems, and the link between science and mysticism, with wit, wisdom, and personal insights.

Bob was born “Robert Edward Wilson” in 1932 in Brooklyn, New York. He suffered from polio as a child and found effective treatment through the Kenny Method, an unconventional treatment using hot moist packs applied to the muscles, that the American Medical Association refused to acknowledge at the time. Lingering symptoms continued, and he walked with a cane due to post-polio muscle spasms, but as a result of his positive experience with the Kenny Method, Bob remained open to alternative medical perspectives throughout his life.

Bob attended Catholic grammar schools in New York before gaining admission into Brooklyn Technical High School. After his graduation from high school in 1950, he worked as an ambulance driver, engineering aide, and salesman. From 1952 to 1957 Bob studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and English education at New York University from 1957 to 1958.

It was in the late 1950s that Bob first began writing professionally, as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter. Around this time is when he adopted his maternal grandfather’s name, “Anton,” for his writings. In 1958 Bob married Arlen Riley, and they remained married until her death in 1999.

In 1962 Bob edited two magazines, one in Ohio called Balanced Living, and a New York magazine called Fact. Then in 1965, Bob started a job at Playboy Magazine, where he worked as associate editor until 1971. Bob co-edited the magazine’s Playboy Forum, a section consisting of responses to letters, and it was here that ideas for his most famous work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy began to percolate.

Published in 1975, Bob coauthored the cult classic trilogy with his associate Playboy editor Robert Shea. The trilogy consists of three novels that weave together a surreal, satirical, science fiction adventure that revolves around a web of intertwined conspiracy theories and historical facts involving a hidden organization called the “Illuminati” that is secretly running the world. Some of Bob’s other well-known fiction books include Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, Masks of the Illuminati, and The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.

In 1977 Bob published his autobiographical book Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati. This was Bob’s personal story of how his “self-induced brain change” experiments affected him, and it contains a whirlwind of radical ideas. It’s the single most transformative book that I’ve read in my life, and it inspired my career as a writer. Many of the people that I’ve interviewed—such as Timothy Leary and John Lilly — I first learned about from this extraordinary book. Bob later published two additional Cosmic Trigger volumes, and some of his other non-fiction books include The New Inquisition, Right Where You Are Sitting Now, and Quantum Psychology, which I wrote the introduction to in the latest edition.

Bob went back to school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in psychology from Paideia University in California in 1978, and his Ph.D. in 1981. His dissertation on the 8-circuit model of consciousness, first developed by Timothy Leary, was reworked and later published in 1983 as Prometheus Rising, which became one of his most popular books.

In 1981 Bob and Arlen moved to Dublin, Ireland, where they lived for six years. They moved to Los Angeles in 1987, and to Capitola, California in 1995. Bob was a huge admirer of James Joyce and was an expert on his literary work. Bob once remarked, “Dublin, to me, is a James Joyce theme park.”

Bob had a remarkable talent for leading his readers into a perspective where they question assumptions that they didn’t even know that they had, and redefine their unconsciously-constructed notions of reality. He had an uncanny ability to guide people, unsuspectingly, into a mutable state of mind where they are playfully tricked into “aha” experiences that cause them to question their most basic assumptions about what is real and what isn’t. Remarkably, he accomplished this with a wonderful sense of humor, and his writings had a powerful, shamanic quality to them.

I first met Bob at one of his lectures in Santa Cruz in 1988. At the end of his talk, I asked him if he would consider writing a blurb for the back cover of my first book, which I was working on at the time. He didn’t respond with much enthusiasm, as though he got asked this question too many times that day, but he said to have my publisher send him a copy. You can only imagine my excitement when I later learned that he wrote an 11-page introduction to the book, Brainchild,” and Carolyn did the artwork for the cover!

From 1989 to 2007 I saw Bob at least once a week when I attended book readings, discussions, movie nights, celebrations, and other gatherings at his home in Los Angeles and then in Capitola. We read from great literary works, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and Bob’s own Illuminatus! Trilogy. We watched films by Orson Wells and episodes of The Prisoner.” Our friends Valerie Corral, Nick Herbert, and others used to come regularly. It was the best of times.

One evening in the early 1990s I brought Carolyn and Oz Janiger over to meet Bob and Arlen when they were living in Los Angeles. At the time Carolyn had an art exhibit at the Gallerie Illuminati in Santa Monica, which was a striking synchronicity that night.

Bob participated in the roundtable discussions on technology and consciousness with Carolyn and me (along with Ralph Abraham, Nina Graboi, Nick Herbert, Rebecca Novick, and Stephen LaBerge) at UC Santa Cruz in 1993. He sat across from Carolyn on the stage during the event— Mavericks of the Mind Live!— which was recorded by Sound Photosynthesis.

Bob died in 2007 at his home in Capitola. I miss him dearly. Bob had an uncanny ability to perceive things that few people notice, and he had an extraordinarily wide and well-integrated interdisciplinary mind, with an incredible memory. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of many different fields— ranging from literature and psychology to quantum physics, Buddhism, and neuroscience.

Despite some serious personal challenges over the years, Bob always maintained a strongly upbeat, optimistic, and perpetually cheerful perspective on life, and— regardless of the circumstances, and up until his final moments — he never failed to make me smile every time I saw him. Everyone who was fortunate enough to know him agreed; there was something truly magical about Robert Anton Wilson.

I interviewed Bob in 1989 for my book Mavericks of the Mind, which includes my interview with Carolyn. (Exciting news: The third edition of Mavericks of the Mind will be published next year by Hilaritas Press — more on this soon!) I interviewed Bob again in 2003 for my book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

David: Synchronicity is a major theme that runs through your books. What model do you use at present for interpreting this mysterious phenomenon?
Bob: I never have one model. I always have at least seven models for anything.

David: Which one is your favorite?
Bob: Bell’s Theorem combined with an idea I got from Barbara Honegger, a parapsychologist who worked for Reagan. . . . Long before Barbara became a controversial political figure, she gave me the idea that the right brain is constantly trying to communicate with the left. If you don’t listen to what it’s trying to say, it gives you more and more vivid dreams, and if you still won’t listen, it leads to Freudian slips. If you still don’t pay attention, the right brain will get you to the place in space-time where synchronicity will occur. Then the left brain has to pay attention. “Whaaaat!?”

David: What do you think happens to consciousness after physical death?
Bob: Somebody asked a Zen master, “What happens after death?” He replied, “I don’t know.” And the querent said, “But you’re a Zen master!” He said, “Yes, but I’m not a dead Zen master.” Somebody asked Master Eckart, the great German mystic, “Where do you think you’ll go after death?” He said, “I don’t plan to go anywhere.” Those are the best answers I’ve heard so far. My hunch is that consciousness is a non-local function of the universe as a whole, and our brains are only local transceivers. As a matter of fact, it’s a very strong hunch, but I’m not going to dogmatize about it.

by David Jay Brown

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