Tag: Spiritual Exercise
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Giving an honest self-inventory; or, how to be post-ironic
The literary scholar Christy Wampole has called ours an “ironic age” in which “directness has become unbearable to us,” and in “How to Live Without Irony,” her New York Times Stone essay that appeared in this Sunday’s Review, she provides some clues for how we could live in a post-ironic manner. These clues include saying what…
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Responsibility as a child of time
The Pythagoreans were the first, perhaps, to insist so doggedly that one give an account of oneself at the end of each day as if it were one’s final hour. What is responsibility for the entirety of one’s self but taking this thought to heart not at some late date but in each of one’s…
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On eating properly and ‘two kinds of quantity’
I don’t believe that calories–this unit of measure–is a good way of talking about food in general, of talking about ‘how much’ I need to eat or how I go about conceptualizing what it is I eat. My doubts about ‘the calorie’ are born of my wholesale rejection of what goes under the header of…
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Spiritual exercise and metaphysical experience: A birthday meditation
Yesterday afternoon on my birthday, we knocked on the door of a secret meditation room in Soho and no one answered. She knocked a second time and still no one answered. And yet why weren’t we disappointed? “Maybe this is the meditation,” I said as we walked away and laughed. The incident calls me back…
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When I’m running low on food…
When I’m running low on food, I leave my coat and keys where they are. I have a look around and spend another day and then another with what I have around me. I mix them all around me and make my mouth anew. “Make do with what you have?” No, savor whatever passes through your hands.
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 