Year: 2012

• April 7, 2012

  ‘What was most essential for us could not be expressed’

  In this remarkable excerpt from the opening pages of The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009, 5-7, Pierre Hadot speaks about the boyhood mystical experiences that led him, many years later, to embrace philosophical inquiry. “What was most essential for us,”…
• April 4, 2012

  On the art of longing for a radiant way of being

  The truth of metaphysics is revealed in the question, “Can this [way of life] be all?” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics). My longing is a longing for another way of life beyond the one I inhabit. The truth of the perdurance of the soul is that of a being that leaves behind one way of life but…
• April 3, 2012

  ‘I spilled the ink across the page’: Reflections on inquiring about life

  Preface I spend a lot of my time trying out novel experiments, watching them unwind, and then puzzling through what I can learn about their reasons for unraveling. (Mine, a life in letters spelling out failures. All spilled ink across the page.) I worked at two start-ups, have run my own businesses, have conjured up…
• April 2, 2012

  On Dark Mountain Project, having skin in the game, and staking oneself

  In early February, I had a conversation with Jeppe Graugaard, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of East Anglia. The topic of the conversation, which also happens to be the subject of Jeppe’s dissertation, was the Dark Mountain Project, a poetically inspired fellowship that came into being when Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine wrote a…
• March 31, 2012

  A philosophical guide to surviving the transition from an old way of life to a new one

  The following post is written especially for my conversation partners who are now living through a transition. We know that your old way of life has gone under but you’re not yet able to walk into a new way of life. You know I’m concerned that you’re despairing, concerned that you’ll infer that because this way…