Author: Andrew Taggart

• June 26, 2012

  What is it like for someone not to ‘get me’?

  “[E]loquence consists of saying the right things and only the right things.” –Rochefoucauld What is it like for someone not to ‘get me?’ She can be focused on me but ask the wrong questions. He can be focused on me but look at the wrong things. She can care for me but fail to recognize…
• June 25, 2012

  There is no ‘double life’ in philosophical life

  One concern has been raised many times by many conversation partners in many quarters. It is that philosophical friendships and erotic lovers are rare. Yet if most of our lives are spent in the world among those of a non-philosophical persuasion, how are we to make sense of this “double life,” a life both apart from the…
• June 23, 2012

  Good marriages can’t be thrown away

  Imagine that a marriage is falling apart and that the disaffected demands of the other, “How can you throw away what we’ve worked so long and hard for–how after all these years together, and for what?” Suppose that these questions are not simply expressions of sorrow and imminent grief. Suppose that the questions are asked…
• June 22, 2012

  Heat and Summer Solstice

  I The temperature will itch toward 100 degrees and we will want to itch. The key will be ascesis: to breath and be calm, to be skin. II One day after the Summer Solstice the gods are smiling divinely. Some are in fits. The rest are philosophical: loving the steadiness of breath. III Joan most…
• June 21, 2012

  Old Whitman and me just singing

  Recently old Walt Whitman spoke to me. He said of himself, singing a Song of Myself: Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,  For me those that have been boys and that love women, For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,…