Month: January 2012

• January 13, 2012

  Why humor is a saving grace and how life gets better with the really? are you so sure? question

  I can’t possibly examine my life unless (1) I’m able to take a reflexive stance toward my desires, beliefs, and values and unless (2) I’m willing to test those desires, beliefs, and values. The first condition concerns my capacity to reorient myself toward my life while the second condition stakes the possibility of my thinking…
• January 12, 2012

  On the colorings and shadings of moods

  The mood is heavy this morning. The window appears squeegeed with water. The rain clicks and thuds and thumps. Three pigeons in the birch tree hold themselves to a small branch tilted at an upward sloping angle. This morning New York City might as well be a trawler out at sea, caught in the midst…
• January 11, 2012

  On rites of passage and walkabouts

  I met Peter Barnett, an Australian in his 50s, through Paul Monk, a former intelligence officer in Australia and presently a consultant and polymath, to whom I had, some months back, sent a note of praise about one of his papers on cognitive biases, to which he had replied with thanks, and because of which…
• January 10, 2012

  On lived logic and speculative philosophy

  The Stoics enjoined their pupils to live according to nature. The dictum, in essence, says that metaphysics is the way of ethics. If my way of my life is not in harmony with the way of the world, then I shall be overcome with strife, believing either in the power of my will to crush…
• January 9, 2012

  On the life need of cuisine; or, how we forgot how to eat

  I went to a dinner party this past weekend in which a lovely woman told a story that, to me, read like an allegory of irony. It went something like this: she’s kneeling at her father’s casket, weeping. Behind her in the pews, just within earshot, a man says to the man next to him,…