Short stories by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). A protégé of Gustave Flaubert, he was a representative of the Naturalist school, who depicted human lives and destinies in disillusioned, even pessimistic terms. “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing”.

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Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and others on Asceticism

Excerpts from theories of animal signaling

An introduction to Diogenes the Cynic and William Blake’s “The Proverbs of Hell”

Segments from G. Van der Leeuw’s “Religion in Essence and Manifestation”, 1938

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Segment from “The Melancholy of Race”, where the exoticized vs traditional beauty of Asian Americans is enacted in Hollywood’s only Asian musical, “Flower Drum Song”

Short story by David Foster Wallace

Selected poems on religious themes by Denise Levertov

Excerpts from the Bible in no particular order

Excerpts from Byung-Chul Han’s The Scent of Time

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