Tag: Solitude

• September 24, 2012

  ‘When you head into the country, it’s best to take your Thoreau along with you…’

  When you head into the country, it’s best to take your Thoreau along with you. Marilynne Robinson calls the West “lonesome” and means it to be a virtue. I want so much for life to be quiet and wind-spoken. Thinking sounds–comes and sounds–like this. Like wind speaking. We’ll be in the mountains for almost a…
• April 20, 2012

  ‘Their philosophy is for others; I need one for myself’

  In Interview 139, the soft-spoken gentlemen at Philosophy Bites finally got around to asking professional philosophers what it is they do with their time. What, they queried, is philosophy? Some said that philosophy is the analysis of our concepts. Others said that philosophy is the examination of the presuppositions underlying what we normally take for…
• October 19, 2011

  On what I learned from fasting

  Removing the inessentials is not a form of punishment; it is an act of joy. “He who knows that he has enough–is rich” (Tao te Ching). “The highest goodness is like water” (Peter France, Hermits: The Insights of Solitude). My defects have been pride and prejudice. I grew up with an overvaluation of my own…