Category: Ideas and Reflections

Reminders and Ruminations on Politics

Election years, war years, years of challenge, decay, and doubt — in other words, all years — condition the soil for the germination and growth of the soul’s two most attractive invasive plants, despair and hope. To fall under the spell of the former is to forget to live; to fall under the spell of the latter is to forget to die. A...

Random Reflections: Hearing Voices

I occasionally post some thoughts here in Limbo under the title, “Random Reflections.” I am not in general an aficionado of randomness, and by “random,” when I apply the word to my written thoughts, I never mean chance or arbitrary. I mean something more like reflections that have no obvious place within ordinary discourse, or that seem to come from somewhere just beyond...

Things I Almost Know

On conservation of energy.— In a millennium, nothing I own today will exist in a recognizable way. In ten millennia, nothing anyone owns today will so exist. In a hundred millennia, today’s existence itself, which is to say our world, will no longer be present in any remotely identifiable form. In a thousand millennia, we will all be a wisp of a rumor;...

Notes On A Life In Limbo

I would rather live in exile and see things as they really are, with the clarity of distance and detachment, than end up dead in a Siberian prison camp because I thought I could fight the tyranny and “free my people” from the inside. Which approach is nobler? There is undeniably something spectacular in the latter choice. But does not true nobility eschew...

Limbo More Than Ever

I have been absent from Limbo for longer than usual, due to the death of my father. Needless to say, a lot of noteworthy events have occurred in the world of public significance during my absence, but — also needless to say — nothing really substantial has changed. A brief roundup of what I have observed, unsurprisingly, upon my return to the real...

Independent Judgment In The Age of Mob Rule

A few days ago, Armond White at National Review published his retrospective assessment of Rob Reiner’s cult favorite comedy, The Princess Bride. His basic take on the movie, which as he notes with disapproval is often affectionately cited by conservatives (i.e., NR writers and readers), is that it lacks both artistic and moral coherence, and owes its enduring popularity to the fact that...

Two Reflections On Higher Education

The purpose of higher education, as originally founded in the solid ground of the classical philosophic life, was to foster the civilized notions that there is no real safety in numbers; that truth is not amenable to popular opinion; that the adage “knowledge is power” is not reversible; that detached, quiet reflection is the only antidote to the intellectual poison of the public...

Reflections: Crises of Faith, Smallness of Mind, Discomfort

Faith vs. Convenience.– A student recently wrote to me about the diary of a well-known Korean author, written for a Catholic magazine, describing her emotional journey following the death of her son. At the heart of the diary is the author’s struggle, quite typical of such stories, whether public or private, to find an answer to such questions as, “Why would God do...

Reflections On The New Tribalism

A Symptom.— Public shaming implies a character that is incapable of mercy, which implies a lack of empathy, which implies an inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, which implies seeing the other as specially separate and thus essentially unfamiliar. The inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, i.e., to see the subjectively unfamiliar as objectively familiar, indicates an uncivilized man....

Reflections on Appearances

The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said of a famous American director (I quote from ancient memory), “He points the camera somewhere, I suppose, but he doesn’t see anything.” Today, four billion would-be cinéma vérité auteurs are pointing their own cameras “somewhere,” as we may suppose, but the assumption that all this pointing and shooting constitutes seeing, or revealing, anything —...