Tag: life

• February 7, 2025

  The Weirdest Thing

  The weirdest thing that seems to happen has never actually happened. I seem to have woken up from the dream state and, as a result, I really do believe and feel that I am the waker, an individual with a life to lead. Chalk this mistake up as the weirdest weirdness there possibly is. After…
• January 13, 2014

  Sustaining life is not the good life

  I write this post after spending time this morning contemplating the nature of things. This post is not a ‘product’ of that contemplation. * In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor has some remarkable things to say about the disappearance of the higher forms of the good life during the passage to modernity. He argues that…
• January 27, 2012

  On first words, last lines, and final thoughts

  It was while lying in bed beneath the flowered sheets that I’d read to her the opening line of Mrs. Dalloway and we’d loved. “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” And it was while lying on the grass beside the northern spring lake that she’d read, less enthusiastically, the opening lines of To…
• December 9, 2011

  The alien and the American discuss modern work life (P.S. It’s a joke)

  So the alien has scheduled an appointment with the American in order to compare notes about work life on their respective planets. This is what they said. Alien: On my planet, we have ‘companies’ that occupy physical spaces known as ‘office buildings.’ American: Yeah, we have those too. Alien: Also. On my planet, we have…
• 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…