Category: meditation
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On Beckett’s bad jokes
Beckett got it wrong because he got there too late. And then all he could do, all he could think to do was to tell a joke. The joke is that one must strive–with no view that toward which one must strive; that one must be patient without hope; courageous without reason; must keep to one’s…
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On the danger of sentimentality
To be sentimental is to feel more than one ought. The sentimental man has no good reason to feel as he does, and thus there is no depth, nor can there be, to his feeling. The emotion, like a sensation, flits over him, is cheaply had, and then readily returns to the air. He watches…
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Must one ‘make a sharp break with the academy’ in order to be a philosopher? A conversation
“[A] conversation is a dramatic work, even if a very short one, in which the participants are not only the actors, but also the joint authors, working out in agreement or disagreement the mode of their production.” –Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue — Early last week, I received a note from J. about my thoughts concerning Stanley…
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On missing each other
It’s so easy to miss each other. You look, and I’m not there. Or I’m there, right on the spot, and you miss me even as you keep, you say, you keep your eye peeled. Even though you keep an eye out for me. The watchman: “You Gods in heaven– / You have watched me…
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Mark Edmundson on Health Now!
All this blather about health and exercise. All this fastidious concern with vitamins and prescriptions. All this worry over living longer and Social Security and… well, living longer. Health without ideals is sickening, Mark Edmundson argues. Edmundson’s is a refreshingly honest Platonic defense of living for the sake of higher ideals. Huzzah! Hurray! The reductio ad…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 