Year: 2012

• February 7, 2012

  A very brief tutorial on drawing material inferences

  Formula When P does or embodies X (where X is a good thing), I do or say or emote-think what is appropriate, accurate, needful, beautiful, or good. And now here’s my good friend P. Examples When P asks a question, I reply with a suitable answer. When P is holding a large package, I hold…
• February 6, 2012

  On death scenes and final words

  Montaigne muses in an early essay about the possibility that the true test of a life may be how well we act in our final scene. How well have we prepared ourselves for death? How do we face it? Do we regard it with equanimity? With cowardice? With ennui? Today, we rarely face it at…
• February 4, 2012

  Austen’s ethical vision of wholehearted love

  My essay on Jane Austen can now be read at World and I. Typical among Austen readers and academic scholars is the claim that she was keen to cast a critical eye on genteel society, and yet she entertained no thought of going beyond its inequalities and class distinctions. My suggestion is that this nay-saying–the satirical…
• February 3, 2012

  My night with Colbert, my week with Montaigne

  It was fitting that one man I met on Monday night believes that reality has “the structure of a dream.” He was an eccentric  mid-40 something traveling across the country: from Spokane, Washington, down through Texas, and up and over, by way of New York City, to Cape Cod. Along the way, he was being…
• February 2, 2012

  Bernini’s Pluto and Proserpina: Beauty, death, and eros

  The image you are looking at was not taken by a camera. Nor were the fingers pressed into the underside of the woman’s thigh. Nor the index finger–his left index finger–hooked onto her lower rib, marking it. Nor the veins on her butt beginning at the the top of her hip. Nor was the birthmark…