Occasionally, I post new-to-me words discovered during my reading rambles. I do this for my edification. If you’ve stumbled across this post and you're a word-nerd, you might enjoy these as well. Following each word is a short definition (sometimes with a thought interjected parenthetically), trailed by the context in which the word was found.
quietistic (from the word quietism): devotional contemplation and abandonment of the will as a form of religious mysticism | “Progressives because they think all Asian religions are purely and simply world-denying evasions into trance, and systematic repudiations of matter, the body, the senses and so on, with the eventual result that they are passive, quietistic and stagnant.” - Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton
encephalopathy: a disease in which the functioning of the brain is affected by some agent or condition (such as viral infection or toxins in the blood) | “When Hemingway checked into the Mayo Clinic in the fall of 1960 for electroshock treatment for depression, he was almost certainly suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the brain disorder now widely seen in football players.” - Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, Willam Sounder
aidōs: (‘shamefastness’) “is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact, an instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.” | Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
quies: rest, repose, quiet, calm, lull | “The spirit of the tea ceremony is found in the basic norms which govern it: Harmony, Respect, Purity (of heart) and Stillness (in the sense of quies and hesychia). - Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton
hesychia: stillness, quiet, tranquility | “The spirit of the tea ceremony is found in the basic norms which govern it: Harmony, Respect, Purity (of heart) and Stillness (in the sense of quies and hesychia). - Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton