Love and Repetition
If you repeat anything for long enough, you will be brought to love the activity or the object (if the activity is one best characterized by a transitive verb)....
Author: Kristin Primus
On America
You play with ace and diamond, bat and ball, horse and track, gun and fowl, but, frolicsome Americans, is there not a finer game to be played? You exalt ...
Meingast on Vacation
All this (I sweep my hands out in front of me) that I ostend, these Prussian meadows with their red poppies, with their pale caducous calyxes, the black firs ru...
The Elixir of Sunbeams
An entry on Meingast was written for the 1923 edition of the Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie (Schwabe & Co Verlag), but Meingast’s attorney wr...
On Hospitality (from the Guide to the “Good” Life)
To roast the suckling pig alone, stoking the fire with an iron recast from discarded, dull and dented tools, is the nadir of one’s life. But to roast it w...
Meingast’s Guide to the “Good” Life
From Guide to the “Good” Life (1926): It’s common Austrian wisdom that the more one reads and thinks, the sicker and uglier the body becomes. ...
Marginalia
This was written in Meingast’s distinctive script next to Luther’s hymn “Ein neues Lied wir heben an” in a hymnal owned by the Universit...
Pets
By all accounts, Meingast was fond of animals. In 1910 or 1911, he adopted two kittens. Dr. Marie de Besombes (a librarian at the BNF) thinks there’s a go...
Poem: “Towards the city centre to Gaudenzdorf”
This short poem was composed after Meingast rode the new steam tram in Vienna in 1887: Too close and too many and there is no near handle/and we know all of it ...
On Practical Reasoning
From Insouciance in Deliberation (1899): To really deliberate, that is, to vividly imagine oneself persisting into one future, adjusting that mysterious stew o...
Hallowed Hollowness
From “Hallowed Hollowness: On Machines and Modernity”: “The modern man of science wonders to himself, “If I were to arrange things thus-...
Maria von Klemperer II
The union (he would have hated that word, of course) between Adalbert and Maria was short-lived because Maria herself was short-lived: she intentionally overdo...
Meingast’s poem for children
Exciting news, all! I’ve located a manuscript of Meingast’s 1903 poem for children, “Entartete Entenarten.” It’s in a library in L...
Maria von Klemperer
He courted her in the cruelly hot summer of 1867 when he was stationed outside Linz. From a youthful diary entry: “She wanted to be expressive, yes, but h...
On Love
“One plus one will never be one. Only and forever two. But that does not diminish anything: a current only passes when there is a difference in charge....
Poem: “Watching the Canvas at the Rijksmuseum”
Meingast travelled to Amsterdam in 1885 to go to the Rijksmuseum, which had just moved into its new building (that “disorienting hodgepodge of Gothic and ...