Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE ‘I WANT to tell you—I must tell you all about it.’ With a kind of grave finality, the little woman in the deck chair next to mine snapped together the collapsible drinking-cup with which she had been playing, and sat up, laying a small eager hand…

The Winters Tale Leontes was the King of Sicily, and his dearest friend was Polixenes, King of Bohemia. They had been brought up together, and only separated when they reached man’s estate and each had to go and rule over his kingdom. After many years, when each was married and had a son, Polixenes came…

THE GLORY-BOX BY ELIZABETH ASHE I In Southern Ohio a girl’s wedding chest is her Glory-Box. If, like Mabel Bennet, you are the daughter of a successful druggist, the box is of cedarwood, delivered free of charge by the Dayton department stores; but if, like Eunice Day, you are the daughter of an unsuccessful bookkeeper…

BUTTERCUP-NIGHT BY JOHN GALSWORTHY WHY is it that in some places there is such a feeling of life being all one; not merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but a single breathing, glowing, growing thing, of which we are no more important a part than the swallows and magpies, the foals and sheep in…

BY H. G. DWIGHT IN THE PASHA’S GARDEN Chapter 1 As the caïque glided up to the garden gate the three boatmen rose from their sheepskins and caught hold of iron clamps set into the marble of the quay. Shaban, the grizzled gatekeeper, who was standing at the top of the water-steps with his hands…

The Bride Roses Miss Corona awoke that June morning with a sigh, the cause of which she was at first too sleepy to understand. Then it all came over her with a little sickening rush; she had fallen asleep with tear-wet lashes the night before on account of it. This was Juliet Gordon’s wedding day,…

A SMILE OF FORTUNE HARBOUR STORY Ever since the sun rose I had been looking ahead.  The ship glided gently in smooth water.  After a sixty days’ passage I was anxious to make my landfall, a fertile and beautiful island of the tropics.  The more enthusiastic of its inhabitants delight in describing it as the…

THE INVISIBLE GIRL. This slender narrative has no pretensions to the regularity of a story, or the development of situations and feelings; it is but a slight sketch, delivered nearly as it was narrated to me by one of the humblest of the actors concerned: nor will I spin out a circumstance interesting principally from…

A HELPLESS SITUATION Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern, a pattern that never materially changes, in form and substance, yet I cannot get used to that letter—it always astonishes me. It affects me as the locomotive always affects me: I say to myself, “I have seen you a…