Category: meditation

• October 16, 2011

  On birthdays as last days

  Here’s my short essay on public philosophy, education, and our spiritual predicament at Butterflies and Wheels. — I’m spending my birthday tomorrow fasting and meditating. The following is an excerpt from Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone is Our Happiness; Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009, 162-6. — Jeannie…
• October 14, 2011

  Friday meditation: On dreams of old friends (a parable)

  Last night I dreamt of an old friend. I had popped my head into a shop despite my reticence about window shopping. It was something I never did. There among the sweaters I saw my old friend. “Jules!,” a young man cried out to another, as if it’d been years since they’d seen each other.…
• October 12, 2011

  DIY Wednesday: premeditatio malorum

  I was frightened this morning, and as I write the fear is not all gone. This morning my computer would not boot; it would only go round and round in an loop in which the opening screen would flash, pause, grow dark, get light, and flash again. I was frightened, I say. It has returned…
• October 7, 2011

  Friday meditation: Unnaming our nonsense

  Unnaming All of Them After she, formerly Eve, unnames all the wild and domesticated animals and all the pets so that wild and domesticated and petted are all one with each other as well as with her, she relates, “My words must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I…
• October 6, 2011

  On the caress

  “A caress has to be accepted,” says Jerome in Eric Rohmer’s 1970 film Claire’s Knee about love, desire, and commitment. Can food also be a caress? —