Big Changes Coming to Genius & Ink 🖋️

Dear friends,

It’s hard to discover a thinker who truly inspires you, and then keep their ideas to yourself. I believe you can relate to this. Encountering a profound insight is like glimpsing a mirage in the desert while dying of thirst. Instinctively, you turn to your companions, pointing toward the horizon: “Look! Look—we’ve found water at last! Nourishment for the soul!”

Or perhaps a better image is this: imagine ourselves on a ship, tossed back and forth by the waves of a storm, uncertain, unsteady, when suddenly, land appears on the horizon. Solid ground. A place to stand. A good book, or a powerful idea, affects us in just this way: it anchors us, gives us footing, and restores our sense of direction.

Someone who has read Simone Weil for example, knows that her thought is limitless and one can spend a lifetime thinking and expanding on her ideas. She is an infinite well one can draw from. Her ideas gift us gravity and grace. She is a kind of a thinker who satisfies your thirst, nourishes you to your roots, when you feel that you are slowly spiritually wilting.

What you see on the photo is just a small glimpse of the thinkers who have kept me company over the past four months—Simone Weil, Sarah Sands, Epicurus, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Hermann Broch, Edith Hamilton and many others who, for now, remain in the background due to the ongoing Dante Read-Along.

Some of these voices may be familiar to you, others entirely new. But whether you know them well or not at all, I believe they are worth discovering. I believe you will enjoy the taste of their prose, you will find their ideas helpful, you will make their experiences your own.

Over the past few months, my focus has been on the Dante Read-Along, which I continue to cherish deeply. Yet, there have been moments, quiet, electric moments, when I stumbled upon a passage, an idea, a phrase that made me pause. I longed to share it with you, but time was not always on my side.

So I’m writing today to let you know that

Genius & Ink 🖌

is expanding—and with it, I hope, your reading list. While Dante remains our guide, I’ll now be sharing reflections from other writers and ideas that I couldn’t bear to keep to myself.

I would like to introduce you to the sections of this newsletter and also begin by announcing one brand-new section, all these will gradually become a part of the Genius & Ink newsletter.

New sections:

Letters 🪶 - I’d like to revive the ancient art of writing a letter to a great thinker of the past. This was practiced by Cicero, Petrarch and many others. In my case, my first letters are going to be addressed to Cicero. These reflective pieces will be philosophical and will have their own section.

Book Reviews - It is difficult to review great books. How does one review War & Peace in two thousand words? The goal of these Book Reviews isn’t to summarise every plot point or analyse every theme. It’s to offer you a glimpse into the ideas that captivated me while reading. If something here sparks your curiosity, I hope it inspires you to pick up the book yourself and dive deeper. (Expect your reading pile to rise!)

Podcast - I have thousands of notes collected over the years in my journal—thoughts that provoked me into deeper reflection and I’d like to share them with you, or rather, to discuss them with you. I also feel the need for a space where I can be more at ease. Writing a piece often feels like being an architect designing a house, with words as the bricks and passages as the walls.

So, expect some audio podcasts coming your way as well.

⏰ Teasers of Future Posts:

Some pieces already prepared for you to read coming very soon to your inbox:

• Podcast Episode 🎙️ : The Inner Citadel: Four Women Against the Void (Arendt, Weil, Rand and Beauvoir)

• Letters 🪶 : On Persian Conspiracies and Modern Myths

• Book Review 🖊️ : Nussbaum: Reading as a Spiritual exercise.

❔ You might ask: at what pace will these pieces land in your inboxes?

The answer would be that my aim is to do this every two weeks. It will allow me time to breathe between the Read-Alongs. I might share with you something every week, maybe every three weeks, but I will be aiming at two weeks. But my intention is always the same: to give you something that’s genuinely worth your time.

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❗️ Important Part: Do Not Skip This

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Genius & Ink 🖌

newsletter, Dante Read-Along or both.

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