Boredom is usually caused by excessive vanity and can be cured by taking interest in something outside of oneself. Burnout, he notes, stems not from overwork but from anxiety and indecision. And in a way, it feels strange to classify the book in that genre, given that it’s written by a philosopher of mathematical logic who is best known for his Principia Mathematica, a book of formal proofs that Daniel Dennett has called “one of the most unreadable great books ever written.” But despite his technical genius, Russell believed that philosophy should, first and foremost, teach one how to live, and The Conquest of Happiness contains pragmatic advice that remains eminently useful. Self-help wasn’t yet a cultural fixture when Bertrand Russell published The Conquest of Happiness, in 1930. The protagonist that emerges is an incredibly learned, charismatic, and irreverent miller who, in the face of the Roman Inquisition, imagined a view of creation that rings through centuries by way of Ginzburg: “All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together and of that bulk a mass formed-just as cheese is made out of milk-and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” -Lauren Kane, Assistant Editor, 9/17/21 My personal favorite heretic is Menocchio, the subject of Carlo Ginzburg’s 1976 study of sixteenth-century popular culture ‘The Cheese and the Worms.’ Ginzburg’s project breaks the mold of social history by building a narrative from the bottom up, using source materials as far removed from structures of power and influence as he could dredge up, trying even to get at the texture of oral culture lost to time. One undeniable certainty about studying religion in any academic way is that, without even trying, you find yourself having opinions on famous heretics-more precisely, you have favorites.

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Cat stevens biography