Weekend reading and viewing: Karasu’s In Essence

Sylvia R. Karasu.  In Essence: A Tapestry of Selected Writings. 2025.

I wrote a blurb for this gorgeous book.

In Essence collects Dr. Sylvia Karasu’s elegant essays from Psychology Today and other publications.  These cover a broad variety of topics–vegetarianism, twins, opium, gullibility–each full of unexpected information, and all stunningly illustrated with artworks chosen to precisely illuminate the subject under analysis.  The book is breathtaking—a treasure not to be missed.

A brief excerpt from her essay on Collecting: A Demonic Passion:

Key Points

• The accumulator, rationalizing that someday things will come in handy, amasses an assortment of objects without any discernment.
• The collector, different from the accumulator and the hoarder, engages in a voluntary activity of selecting and ordering.
• People can collect objects, but also ideas and experiences.
• Collecting may include elements of exhibitionism, addiction, and obsession when the collection possesses the collector.

She writes:

“Let me look at my demon objectively. With the exception of my parents, no one really understood my obsession,

and it was many years before I met a fellow sufferer,” wrote the internationally renowned novelist Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1999). Continues Nabokov, “Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration.”