Let’s consider truth. Truth in the abstract. The concept of truth. Why does it matter to us? To be clear, the question is not whether particular things are true or not, or whether we prefer truth to falsity, or even our affinity for truth as opposed to falsehood in ourselves or others. The question is: Why […]
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Chance or the Dance
I found Thomas Howard’s book Chance or the Dance because I’d read Eugene Warren’s poem Christographia XIV. Warren used the phrase Chance or the Dance and I thought it would be a good title for a book I’ve written and am just beginning to market, examining evidence (existence, intuition, yearning, significance, and so on) according to […]
Read more...Outrage
I would like to introduce you to Rene Girard, if you’re not already familiar with his work, but first this. Micah Mattix, in his excellent Prufrock daily blog, quotes a W.H. Auden note to a publisher who refused Ezra Pound’s poetry because he (Pound) was a fascist. Auden wrote: “[B]egin by banning his poems not […]
Read more...Search for Certainty
I read an interesting interview of Meghan O’Gieblyn upon the publication of her book of essays Interior States, in an on-line version of Mockingbird magazine dated Feb 14, 2019. I’m excerpting one question and answer for you because it pertains to the so-called “New Atheists” of a few years ago. I used to get so exercised […]
Read more...Mimetic Desire
Interesting (to me) quote from an 1853 book by John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, […]
Read more...Metaphysical Vibration
I’ve often said that modern culture is essentially materialistic, in the philosophical sense that material (physical) things are deemed to be all there is. And yet, materialists routinely invoke language of the transcendental to explain what’s going on around them, including the word “transcendent” itself. It’s confusing. It has the effect of masking the absence of […]
Read more...Margin Thinking
A couple of nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night and sent myself an email, and then went back to sleep. The next morning I found an email from myself which only said, in the subject line: “we are margin thinkers.” I had this whole constellation of understanding the night before. […]
Read more...Pollution and Purification
You may not know of Mark Steyn, a political and cultural commentator. He’s got a blog that I commend to you, here. I get his weekly summaries, usually on Sunday. In last Sunday’s, he wrote about Tucker Carlson, a commentator on Fox and author of Ship of Fools/How A Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the […]
Read more...But A Vapor
I recently attended a memorial service for the son of family friends. There must have been 500 people there. The family’s community centers on their church, and many braved the rain and cold to get there on a Saturday morning whether they knew the son or not. It put me in an Ecclesiastes frame of mind, […]
Read more...Like Lightning
I finished Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos. I’m not big on self-help books, normally, but I like listening to Peterson’s debates and interviews, and I especially liked the series he did on old testament stories. I actually downloaded the transcripts of those and pored over them. Very insightful. In fact, I […]
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