Category: philosophical counseling

• February 22, 2012

  Late afternoon, the fugitive stillness

  There’s a moment, not long, sometime after late afternoon but well before twilight. It’s not like the early morning before the signs turn to face you and the feet clap up the stairwells. It’s not like the “dead of night” or the “dead of winter” when stillness is near universal and the “streets are empty.”…
• February 20, 2012

  ‘I arrived a bit early…’: How Susan made it to Chinatown

  On Tuesday night in the hours before the rain came, she’d brought Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag over to my place (to read part 1 of the story, go here or simply look one column over to your right) and placed it on the orange chest next to my copies of Seneca’s letters…
• February 17, 2012

  When Lois came to stay

  From Monday evening to Thursday afternoon, Lois came to stay with us. She keeps her things–fresh linens, washed towels, extra toiletries–stored in two boxes in the back of the unused closet in David’s old study. She brings three bags, as well as a large purse, with her. Joan tells me she went through a box…
• February 16, 2012

  Commentary on Laozi’s Daodejing, no. 34: ‘The great Way floods her banks…’

  The excerpt, below, is from Laozi, Daodejing, trans. Edmund Ryden, intro. Benjamin Penny, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 71. Bracketed numbers, e.g., [1], occurring at the end of the lines correspond to my notes following the text. Bear in mind that I have never studied Daoism and, in fact, had not picked up Daodejing…
• February 15, 2012

  On 2 visions of philosophy

  The following is a commentary on David E. Cooper, “Visions of Philosophy,” Conceptions of Philosophy, ed. Anthony O’Hear, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. pp. 1-14. Due to copyright restrictions, I can’t include a copy of the paper below. As insufficient recompense, I offer running commentary. The latter tracks the sections in Cooper’s paper but also…