Tag Archives: Socrates

‘Frail Absolute’ Book Not For Faint Hearted

Cover of Frail Absolute

Plato’s The Republic challenged the way humankind thought. Now, a immigrant from then-Communist Hungary is posing a similar challenge: Is perception reality, why can one individual’s experience of reality differ so radically from another’s, and how can humankind’s search for a deity be what ultimately separates us from each other and from Nature?

Heady stuff, and Istvan Deak’s book, Frail Absolute, is not for the faint-hearted.

Neither is the author, who fled Hungary illegally with his wife and lived in an Italian refugee camp for six months before being allowed into Montreal, Canada. There, Deak secured a job using brooms and mops in an expert way cleaning hospital corridors, and eventually writing commercial business software programs. A short time later, he moved to Toronto, where he and his wife live now.

3rd Century AD scroll fragment of Plato’s Republic

A philosophy is born. As this self-described analytical introvert began revisiting the philosophers he had read as a teenager, long-quiet questions began to surface about religion, about matter and energy, about how humans interact with one another. And he began writing Frail Absolute.

“I understood that the Force of Reality blew up in the Big Bang and created our universe,” Deak says.

“That Force, that Absolute, has been and must be present in everything in a most profound manner. Otherwise, everything would cease to exist.”

As he wrote and thought and questioned, his epiphany came.

“I asked this Force of Reality, ‘Where can I find you?’ And the reply came back, ‘Who is it who stirs your mind so that you want to know this?'” the author says.

As in The Republic, where Socrates and others discuss the meaning of justice, happiness, soul and the roles of the philosopher in society, characters in Frail Absolute discuss the meaning of reality, perception and harmony. Where Socrates vision culminates in a city ruled by philosopher-kings, Frail Absolute ultimately creates a way to exist in what Deak dubs “the Continuum (All That Is).”

“I have always sought a way to transcend what separates us from one another and from the force that exists everywhere. No matter what one believes in “science, a strict or a benevolent deity, even a non-existent god such as atheists do“ searching for this concept keeps humans apart. All reality is relative to the individual experiencing it,” he says. “Since there can be no single, absolute truth, I imagine how we can instead pursue the shareable values of love, compassion and harmonious collaboration in our daily existence.”

Recent photograph of Istvan Deak

Istvan Deak grew up in Hungary, reading the works of ancient and modern philosophers. As a young adult, he taught math and physics before fleeing Communist Hungary for a refugee camp in Italy with his wife. They emigrated to Canada, where he eventually joined a railway company and then began writing software applications as a freelancer. He plans for Frail Absolute to be just the first of many philosophical books.

Istvan Deak’s Wikipedia Page

Sample page from Frail Absolute

Misconception That Education Is End Of Road

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” -Socrates
There is a misconception that education is the end of a road. On the contrary, it is merely the beginning. For many of us, youth is taken up with those things we feel we need to learn and less so with all that we most desire to know. Once we come of age, we begin to truly earn our education, gleaning the knowledge we have craved all along. This is the case for many artists who spend years, decades in other pursuits having been told that their inclination toward art is unsustainable or simply wrong.


Peter Cole is is a poet who works prodigiously with painters. Recently he has worked with Terry Winters who asked him to write about his current works. Some of that series appeared in Paris Review and sparked a series of work from Winters in turn which again sparked another series of writing and so forth.


Cole’s work includes translations from Hebrew and he explains that one of the most famous aspects of translation in the 20th century is that poetry is lost in translation. To hear more about Cole’s work as well as more about the concept of translating poetry, listen to the complete interview.
Diego Leclery is presently working in his studio in Queens. When he left school his work dematerialized considerably for roughly 11 years until very recently when he and his wife were able to get a house and designate studio space. At the moment he is hard at work building out a studio space.
Although Leclery could have afforded a studio when he worked full time, he hesitated and waited until he could afford a practice that was entirely material and could be everything or nothing.

Diego Leclery


To hear more from Diego Leclery, including his thoughts on modern day confusion and feelings, enlightenment thinking and pre-me-too ideas, all of which culminates in an understanding of limitations, listen to the complete interview. For the Silo, Brainard Carey. Read more from Brainard by clicking here.