Category: meditation

• December 12, 2011

  Can a 4-year-old be wise?

  Point blank: No. But perceptive? Quite. A.’s Ruminations on Metaphysics  In the following dialogue, A. is a 4-year-old boy and B. is his mother and one of my conversation partners. A: You know what, Mom? B: Yes, A. A: Well, when all the people die, when people die, other things live. B: How did you…
• December 7, 2011

  On the art of translation and a sense of a style

  On the Art of Translation. Of David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011), a reviewer at The New Yorker observes, “In the English-speaking world, translation is mostly understood as [here quoting Bellos] ‘the transfer of meaning from one language to another,’ a sense derived…
• December 6, 2011

  Letter writing as spiritual exercise

  Aperitif the First: Yesterday around noon I was running in Central Park. It was unseasonably warm–mid-50s I want to say. I was rounding Lasker Rink and Pool when I caught something out of the corner of my eye and belatedly, unpoetically jumped out of the way. I looked down and began to laugh. It was a…
• December 5, 2011

  The starting point of philosophical self-reflection

  Philosophical thinking begins in severance, in cleavage, in destruction and loss. Something once as familiar as morning light has fled, and its return is in doubt. Our feet, once paddles, have morphed into trunks. Severance begets pain, pain shuddering, and shuddering puts forth philosophical words: self-reflective words, ungainly words, coarse concepts, bedraggled thoughts. Oh but…
• December 2, 2011

  You wander in philosophy in order to turn homeward

  Wolfe was wrong when he said that you never can go home again. He was wrong because philosophy leads you home after your wandering. Only once you get there, you realize that the idea of home has changed, changed blessedly, blessedly changed. I Reading philosophers from all times and climes, I am struck by the…