Category Archives: Philosophy

Culture, Essays, Immigration, Philosophy, Poetry

The Curated Persona vs. The Cultivated Spirit

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.”
— Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

We are living in a time when almost nothing reaches us untouched. Our playlists, our emotions, our faces, our thoughts—all curated, filtered, reassembled. Life itself has been stylized and presented as a gallery: a mosaic of moments arranged not by meaning, but by preference. We scroll instead of wander. We select instead of receive. Even grief and solitude are now captioned.

Curation is no longer a method. It is a worldview. It tells us what to see, how to feel, and increasingly, who to be. What once began as a reverent gesture—a monk illuminating a manuscript, a poet capturing awe in verse—has become an omnipresent architecture of control. Curation promises freedom, clarity, and taste. But what if it now functions as a closed system—resisting mystery, filtering out surprise, and sterilizing transformation?

This essay explores the spiritual consequences of that system: how the curated life may be closing us off from the wildness within, the creative rupture, and the deeper architecture of meaning—the kind once accessed by walking, wandering, and waiting.

Taste and the Machinery of Belonging

Taste used to be cultivated: a long apprenticeship shaped by contradiction and immersion. One learned to appreciate Bach or Baldwin not through immediate alignment, but through dedicated effort and often, difficulty. This wasn’t effortless consumption; it was opening oneself to a demanding process of intellectual and emotional growth, engaging with works that pushed against comfort and forced a recalibration of understanding.

Now, taste has transformed. It’s no longer a deep internal process but a signal—displayed, performed, weaponized. Curation, once an act of careful selection, has devolved into a badge of self-justification, less about genuine appreciation and more about broadcasting allegiance.

What we like becomes who we are, flattened into an easily digestible profile. What we reject becomes our political tribe, a litmus test for inclusion. What we curate becomes our moral signature, a selective display designed to prove our sensibility—and to explicitly exclude others who don’t share it. This aesthetic alignment replaces genuine shared values.

This system is inherently brittle. It leaves little room for the tension, rupture, or revision essential for genuine growth. We curate for coherence, not depth—for likability, not truth. We present a seamless, unblemished self, a brand identity without flaw. The more consistent the aesthetic, the more brittle the soul becomes, unable to withstand the complexities of real life.

Friedrich Nietzsche, aware of human fragility, urged us in The Gay Science to “Become who you are.” But authentic becoming requires wandering, failing, and recalibrating. The curated life demands you remain fixed—an unchanging exhibit, perpetually “on brand.” There’s no space for the messy, contradictory process of self-discovery; each deviation is a brand inconsistency.

We have replaced moral formation with aesthetic positioning. Do you quote Simone Weil or wear linen neutrals? Your tastes become your ethics, a shortcut to moral authority. But what happens when we are judged not by our love or actions, but by our mood boards? Identity then becomes a container, rigidly defined by external markers, rather than an expansive horizon of limitless potential.

James Baldwin reminds us that identity, much like love, must be earned anew each day. It’s arduous labor. Curation offers no such labor—only the performative declaration of arrival. In the curated world, to contradict oneself is a failure of brand, not a deepening of the human story.

Interruption as Spiritual Gesture

Transformation—real transformation—arrives uninvited. It’s never strategic or trendy. It arrives as a breach, a profound disruption to our constructed realities. It might be a dream that disturbs, a silence that clarifies, or a stranger who speaks what you needed to hear. These are ruptures that stubbornly refuse to be styled or neatly categorized.

These are not curated moments. They are interruptions, raw and unmediated. And they demand surrender. They ask that we be fundamentally changed, not merely improved. Improvement often implies incremental adjustments; change implies a complete paradigm shift, a dismantling and rebuilding of perception.

Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” To give genuine attention—not to social media feeds, but to the world’s unformatted texture—is a profoundly spiritual act. It makes the soul porous, receptive to insights that transcend the superficial. It demands we quiet internal noise and truly behold.

Interruption, when received rightly, becomes revelation. It breaks the insidious feedback loop of curated content. It reclaims our precious time from the relentless scroll. It reminds us that meaning is not a product, but an inherent presence. It calls us out of the familiar, comfortable loop of our curated lives and into the fertile, often uncomfortable, unknown.

Attention is not surveillance. Surveillance consumes and controls. Attention, by contrast, consecrates; it honors sacredness. It is not monitoring. It is beholding, allowing oneself to be transformed by what is perceived. In an age saturated with infinite feeds, sacred attention becomes a truly countercultural act of resistance.

Wilderness as Revelation

Before curation became the metaphor for selfhood, wilderness was. For millennia, human consciousness was shaped by raw, untamed nature. Prophets were formed not in temples, but in the harsh crucible of the wild.

Moses wandered for forty years in the desert before wisdom arrived. Henry David Thoreau withdrew to Walden Pond not to escape, but to immerse himself in fundamental realities. Friedrich Nietzsche walked—often alone and ill—through the Alps, where he conceived eternal recurrence, famously declaring: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

The Romantic poets powerfully echoed this truth. William Wordsworth, in Tintern Abbey, describes a profound connection to nature, sensing:

“A sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns…”

John Keats saw nature as a portal to the eternal.

Yet now, even wilderness is relentlessly curated. Instagrammable hikes. Hashtagged retreats. Silence, commodified. We pose at the edge of cliffs, captioning our solitude for public consumption, turning introspection into performance.

But true wilderness resists framing. It is not aesthetic. It is initiatory. It demands discomfort, challenges complacency, and strips away pretense. It dismantles the ego rather than decorating it, forcing us to confront vulnerabilities. It gives us back our edges—the raw, unpolished contours of our authentic selves—by rubbing away the smooth veneers of curated identity.

In Taoism, the sage follows the path of the uncarved block. In Sufi tradition, the Beloved is glimpsed in the desert wind. Both understand: the wild is not a brand. It is a baptism, a transformative immersion that purifies and reveals.

Wandering as Spiritual Practice

The Romantics knew intuitively that walking is soulwork. John Keats often wandered through fields for the sheer presence of the moment. Lord Byron fled confining salons for pathless woods, declaring: “I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” His escape was a deliberate choice for raw experience.

William Wordsworth’s daffodils become companions, flashing upon “that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” Walking allows a convergence of external observation and internal reflection.

Walking, in its purest form, breaks pattern. It refuses the algorithm. It is an act of defiance against pre-determined routes. It offers revelation in exchange for rhythm, the unexpected insight found in the meandering journey. Each footstep draws us deeper into the uncurated now.

Bashō, the haiku master, offered a profound directive:

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”

The pilgrim walks not primarily to arrive at a fixed destination, but to be undone, to allow the journey itself to dismantle old assumptions. The act of walking is the destination.

Wandering is not a detour. It is, in its deepest sense, a vocation, a calling to explore the contours of one’s own being and the world without the pressure of predetermined outcomes. It is where the soul regains its shape, shedding rigid molds imposed by external expectations.

Creation as Resistance

To create—freely, imperfectly, urgently—is the ultimate spiritual defiance against the tyranny of curation. The blank page is not optimized; it is sacred ground. The first sketch is not for immediate approval. It is for the artist’s own discovery.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” Rainer Maria Rilke declared, “You must change your life.” Friedrich Nietzsche articulated art’s existential necessity: “We have art so that we do not perish from the truth.” These are not calls to produce content for an audience; they are invitations to profound engagement with truth and self.

Even creation is now heavily curated by metrics. Poems are optimized for engagement. Music is tailored to specific moods. But art, in its essence, is not engagement; it is invocation. It seeks to summon deeper truths, to ask questions the algorithm can’t answer, to connect us to something beyond the measurable.

To make art is to stand barefoot in mystery—and to respond with courage. To write is to risk being misunderstood. To draw is to embrace the unpolished. This is not inefficiency. This is incarnation—the messy, beautiful process of bringing spirit into form.

Memory and the Refusal to Forget

The curated life often edits memory for coherence. It aestheticizes ancestry, reducing complex family histories to appealing narratives. It arranges sentiment, smoothing over rough edges. But real memory is a covenant with contradiction. It embraces the paradoxical coexistence of joy and sorrow.

John Keats, in his Ode to a Nightingale, confronts the painful reality of transience and loss: “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies…” Memory, in its authentic form, invites this depth, this uncomfortable reckoning with mortality. It is not a mood board. It is a profound reckoning, where pain and glory are allowed to dwell together.

In Jewish tradition, memory is deeply embodied. To remember is not merely to recall a fact; it is to retell, to reenact, to immerse oneself in the experience of the past, remaining in covenant with it. Memory is the very architecture of belonging. It does not simplify complex histories. Instead, it deepens understanding, allowing generations to draw wisdom and resilience from their heritage.

Curation flattens, reducing multifaceted experiences to digestible snippets. Memory expands, connecting us to the vast tapestry of time. And in the sacred act of memory, we remember how grace once broke into our lives, how hope emerged from despair. We remember so we can genuinely hope again, with a resilient awareness of past struggles and unexpected mercies.

The Wilderness Within

The final frontier of uncuration is profoundly internal: the wilderness within. This is the unmapped territory of our own consciousness, the unruly depths that resist control.

Søren Kierkegaard called it dread—not fear, but the trembling before the abyss of possibility. Nietzsche called it becoming—not progression, but metamorphosis. This inner wilderness resists styling, yearns for presence instead of performance, and asks for silence instead of applause.

Even our inner lives are at risk of being paved over. Advertisements and algorithmic suggestions speak to us in our own voice, subtly shaping desires. Choices feel like intuition—but are often mere inference. The landscape of our interiority, once a refuge for untamed thought, is being meticulously mapped and paved over for commercial exploitation, leaving little room for genuine self-discovery.

Simone Weil observed: “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them.” The uncurated life begins in this waiting—in the ache of not knowing, in the quiet margins where true signals can penetrate. It’s in the embrace of uncertainty that authentic selfhood can emerge.

Let the Soul Wander

“Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” — Keats

To live beyond curation is to choose vulnerability. It is to walk toward complexity, to embrace nuances. It is to let the soul wander freely and to cultivate patience for genuine waiting. It is to choose mystery over mastery, acknowledging truths revealed in surrender, not control.

Lord Byron found joy in pathless woods. Percy Bysshe Shelley sang alone, discovering his creative spirit. William Wordsworth found holiness in leaves. John Keats touched eternity through birdsong. Friedrich Nietzsche walked, disrupted, and lived with intensity.

None of these lives were curated. They were entered—fully, messily, without a predefined script. They were lives lived in engagement with the raw, untamed forces of self and world.

“Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake, / A composing as the body tires, a stop. // To see hepatica, a stop to watch. / A definition growing certain…” Wallace Stevens

So let us make pilgrimage, not cultivate a profile. Let us write without audience, prioritizing authentic expression. Let us wander into ambiguity, embracing the unknown. And let us courageously welcome rupture, contradiction, and depth, for these are the crucibles of genuine transformation.

And there—at the edge of control, in the sacred wilderness within, where algorithms cannot reach—
Let us find what no curated feed can ever give.
And be profoundly changed by it.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN USING AI

Books, Essays, Philosophy, Reviews

The Dangerous Clarity, and Disquieting Tremors, of René Descartes

The following essay was written by AI and edited by Intellicurean.

René Descartes once promised a world rebuilt on certainty. Strip away all illusions, he said, and we might begin again—this time on solid ground. For centuries, he has been honored as a liberator of reason. But what if the revolution he sparked came not from clarity, but confusion?

Sandrine Parageauis professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023).

In her recent Aeon essay, “The French Liar,” historian Sandrine Parageau reintroduces Descartes not as the serene founder of modern philosophy, but as a figure who provoked psychological vertigo in his readers and existential dread among his contemporaries. Rather than a clear-eyed rationalist, he appears here as an unsettling alchemist of doubt—one whose method seemed, to some, less like reason and more like manipulation.

A towering figure in intellectual history, Descartes (1596-1650) famously declared, “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. His Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy laid the groundwork for modern science, yet they also disoriented many of his peers. Parageau reveals that, far from being universally hailed, Descartes was condemned by some as a dangerous deceiver. These accusations, initially paradoxical against the architect of systematic reason, become, under Parageau’s scrutiny, a mirror reflecting the profound anxieties of a society on the cusp of modernity.

The Discomfort of Radical Doubt

With almost surgical precision, Descartes urged his readers to divest themselves of all prior opinions, prejudices, and “false knowledge”—to undergo what he called “hyperbolical doubt.” Only by demolishing inherited beliefs, he argued, could one rebuild on indubitable foundations. Parageau highlights how this radical intellectual purification, though meant to be temporary, was viewed by many 17th-century thinkers as dangerous. It wasn’t just a methodological reset; it felt like a descent into cognitive vertigo.

Recent scholarship has begun to echo this emotional reading of Cartesian skepticism. Jan Forsman, in his 2021 dissertation Of Dreams, Demons, and Whirlpools, contends that Descartes’s doubt was not merely a tool, but a lived, transformative experience meant to disorient before it could rebuild. His approach aligns with Parageau’s interpretation of Descartes not as a detached logician, but as a man whose method required emotional unmooring.

Christia Mercer, in her groundbreaking 2017 article “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila,” suggests that Descartes may have borrowed from mystical traditions that emphasized introspective purgation—further embedding emotion into method. The Cartesian self, it turns out, may not have emerged from reason alone, but from something more elemental and uncertain.

The Accusation of Manipulation

One of the most vivid condemnations came from Meric Casaubon, who in a 1668 letter accused Descartes of constructing a philosophy that first annihilated belief, only to restore it through rhetorical domination. Casaubon accused Descartes of promoting ignorance as the pathway to the mysterious grandeur of the Cogito, dragging readers into despair before lifting them back with persuasive flair. “He casts down, and raises again, when they see cause,” Casaubon warned, likening Descartes to a puppet master of the intellect.

Parageau draws a chilling parallel between this 17th-century critique and the modern phenomenon of gaslighting—the psychological manipulation by which one is made to doubt their own sanity. Dutch theologian Martin Schoock was even more explicit in his 1643 Admirable Method, warning that Descartes’s system would lead to “mental disorder,” as it required “putting off the light of reason” and embracing ignorance. What Descartes called meditation, Schoock acidly dismissed as “doing nothing.”

For Casaubon and Schoock, the philosopher’s aim was not liberation, but domination. Descartes’s rigorous doubt appeared, from this angle, as an epistemic trap—a means to unmoor the mind only to reanchor it in his authority. It’s a startling idea: that the father of rationalism was seen by some as an emotional manipulator, wielding confusion as a tool of influence.

Religious and Intellectual Backlash

But such critiques were not merely philosophical. They were deeply rooted in the turbulent religious context of post-Reformation Europe. Descartes’s adversaries often likened his tactics to those of the Roman Catholic Church, which Protestants accused of maintaining clerical control through the suppression of lay understanding.

Parageau reminds us that these condemnations were colored by sectarian conflict. Casaubon aligned Descartes with both Puritans and Jesuits—groups seen as enemies by many Protestant intellectuals. The stakes were theological: Descartes’s critics feared his system lacked the means to support key Christian doctrines, like the soul’s immortality or the existence of God.

Steven Nadler, in recent lectures, has emphasized how Descartes’s method emerged in a time of crumbling metaphysical certainties and escalating religious anxiety. His dismantling of scholastic traditions felt, to many, like a spiritual as well as intellectual provocation.

Even those who admired Descartes’s scientific prowess were uneasy about his religious implications. As Parageau notes, English Protestants of the late 17th century often lauded his mechanics while warning against his metaphysics. His emphasis on method over received wisdom was viewed not merely as innovation, but as insurrection.

The Emotional Roots of Rationality

Here lies Parageau’s most powerful insight. Descartes, she argues, was not coldly analytical, but emotionally raw. His philosophy did not spring from dispassionate logic, but from crisis. As a young man, he discovered the teachings of his youth to be riddled with error. This epiphany caused what biographer Adrien Baillet called “violent agitations” and “psychological distress.”

Parageau, drawing on Tristan Dagron’s interpretation, connects this upheaval to a series of dreams Descartes experienced in 1619—dreams so disturbing that he later modeled his Meditations after them. These dreams blurred the boundaries between wakefulness and delusion, instilling a terror that would echo throughout his philosophical system.

Michel Foucault once argued, in Madness and Civilization, that Descartes expelled madness from the domain of reason. But new interpretations suggest otherwise. Instead of excluding madness, Descartes began from it. Forsman, Mercer, and others point to a method rooted in the very vulnerability it sought to overcome.

Susan James, in her work Passion and Action, has argued that Cartesian philosophy requires the management, not the elimination, of passion. The purification Descartes demanded was emotional as much as intellectual.

A Disquieting Foundation

Parageau concludes that Descartes’s critics were not entirely wrong: his philosophy did produce epistemic anxiety. But where they saw danger, she sees a more nuanced truth. Descartes embraced doubt, disorientation, even a kind of madness—not to harm, but to transform. His rational edifice was not built upon peace of mind, but upon its very rupture. In this, he resembles not a manipulator, but a figure more complex: part mystic, part surgeon, part exile from certainty.

We have long imagined Descartes as the calm architect of modernity. But as Parageau and recent scholars reveal, his foundations were laid atop psychological fault lines. The search for clarity began not with answers, but with tremors. And from that trembling ground, he built a system that still shapes how we think today.

Essays, Language, Philosophy, Psychology

Language: ‘Metaphors Make Life An Adventure’

Psyche Magazine (March 25, 2025) by Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley

Susanne K Langer understood the indispensable power of metaphors, which allow us to say new things with old words

Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic. It is not a development, but a principle.
– from Philosophy in a New Key (1941) by Susanne K Langer

Words are incorrigible weasels; meanings of words cannot be held to paper with the ink.
– from Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III (1982) by Susanne K Langer

Metaphors are double agents. They say one thing and mean another. Their purpose within the symbolic order is to amplify, not deceive – to grow the stock of shared meanings. When we invoke a metaphor, we dislodge words from their literal perch. Our words become ambidextrous, stretched by analogy. We can say new things.

This was among the more important claims made by Susanne K Langer (1895-1985), a neglected American philosopher now experiencing a revival. Langer began her career when the analytic approach was in its formative stages. Women philosophers were rare, and women philosophers specialising in logic were an anomaly. However, the argument she made in her bestselling Philosophy in a New Key (1941) – that music and the other arts bear logical insights that language, science and mathematics can’t capture – served to marginalise her from a philosophical establishment that was, by then, hostile to women. One of Langer’s students, Arthur Danto, later explained why he rarely cited her: in graduate school he picked up that she was regarded as ‘poison’ to a philosophical career.

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One of Langer’s legacies is to help us see that language – to stay fresh, to keep step – needs words to be ‘incorrigible weasels’, double agents. Words mean more than we can say, which lets us say new things with old words. Metaphor, Langer reminds us, is what makes ‘human life an adventure in understanding’.

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Sue Curry Jansen is professor emeritus of media and communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her books include Walter Lippmann (2012) and Stealth Communications (2016).

Jeff Pooley is a research associate and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of mediastudies.press. His books include James W Carey and Communication Research (2016) and the co-edited Society on the Edge (2021).

Essays, Intelligence, Philosophy

‘Suffused With Causality’

AEON MAGAZINE (March 22, 2025) by Mariel Goddu:

Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if. When you plan for tomorrow, wonder how things could have turned out differently, or imagine something impossible (What would it be like to fly?), your causal understanding is at work.

In daily life, causal understanding imbues your observations of changes in the world with a kind of generativity and necessity. If you hear a sound, you assume something made it. If there’s a dent on the car, you know that something – or someone – must have done it. You know that the downpour will make you wet, so you push the umbrella handle to open it and avoid getting soaked. You watch as an acorn falls from a tree, producing ripples in a puddle.

The human power to view cause-and-effect as part of ‘objective reality’ (a philosophically fraught idea, but for now: the mind-independent world ‘out there’) is so basic, so automatic, that it’s difficult to imagine our experience without it. Just as it’s nearly impossible to see letters and words as mere shapes on a page or a screen (try it!), it is terrifically challenging to observe changes in the world as not involving causation. We do not see: a key disappearing into a keyhole; hands moving; door swinging open. We see someone unlocking the door. We don’t see the puddle, then the puddle with ripples-plus-acorn. We see the acorn making a splash.

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Mariel Goddu is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stanford University in California. From 2012-22, she was a practising cognitive scientist, focusing on causal reasoning in early childhood. She earned her first PhD in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Her philosophical work lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, biology, and mind.

Book Reviews, Philosophy, Reviews

Review: ‘Hope, Despair And Retreat In An Unquiet Age’

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (March 13, 2025):

Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And wisdom is early to despair: / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / … So be beginning, be beginning to despair”. We age, decline and die, like everyone we love.

Yet despair is not, to put it mildly, a popular stance. In his “Sonnets of Desolation”, Hopkins fought against it; and the poem that bids us despair was paired with verse consoled by “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”, God. Forced to choose between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, the well-adjusted opt for optimistic hope.

PESSIMISM, QUIETISM AND NATURE AS REFUGE by David E. Cooper

HOPEFUL PESSIMISM by Mara van der Lugt

Two recent books take issue with this upbeat orientation. Both defend pessimism, though to very different ends. Their arguments are timely. The past ten years have made it hard to be optimistic about humanity. We’ve squandered our best chance to confront the coming climate chaos – storms, droughts and famines that will mean suffering on a massive scale – and the looming crises of forced migration and resource scarcity have spawned reactionary nationalism, not solidarity. In the US, democracy is under threat. The damage will be difficult to repair: it’s easier to wreck trust and infrastructure than to build them up.

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Classics, Philosophy, Reviews

Ancient Greece: The Erotics Of (Re)reading Plato’s “Phaedrus”

THE PARIS REVIEW (February 10, 2025): Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, his master and erastēs (older male lover).

SOCRATES: Dear Phaedrus, wither away, and where do you come from?

PHAEDRUS: From Lysias, Socrates … and I am going for a walk outside the wall [of Athens].

Earlier that day, Phaedrus says, Lysias had given him a speech in which he described the erotic relationship that a master can have with a young disciple whom he does not love, with whom he is not in love.

PHAEDRUS: Lysias has represented one of the beauties being tempted, but not by a lover; this is just the clever thing about it; for he says that favors should be granted rather to the one who is not in love than to the lover.

This report does not satisfy Socrates. Dying to know more, he is determined not to let Phaedrus out of his sight; he will follow him everywhere, hound him until he agrees to read Lysias’s speech to him. At the very threshold of the reading scene there thus emerges a close and complex connection between loving and reading, two verbs, two gerunds, between which, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it makes sense to leave open all the possible punctuation marks, including the possibility that there be none (as though one wrote them in scriptio continua, with no space between them, which was a common scriptural practice in Plato’s day). Loving()reading could then be read (or connected) at least in two different ways:

1. Lovingreading or loving-reading (a double verb, conjugated as transitive, where what one loves-reads is someone or something, Lysias or the book).

2. Loving reading (in which case, it is reading that one loves).

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