Enjoying the view from Limbo
A student asks me what I make of the fact that she often talks to herself while walking, either repeating words she has recently said to someone or imagining what she would say in situations yet to come. My reply: I talk to myself while walking all the time. Sometimes I suddenly catch myself talking a bit too audibly, or with too much...
I designate this item “Part One” because I wish to emphasize that by no means is the following short list meant to be exhaustive of all the people I don’t like. There are a whole lot more people I don’t like, but I’ll get to them later. In other words, if you don’t see yourself on this list, don’t give up hope; you...
One year ago today, I was sitting in a hospital bed awaiting surgery for a broken foot, trying to distract myself from the thought of losing my lifelong pastime and natural condition — walking — for an indefinite period of time. That evening, my chosen method of meditative self-discipline was to write about my experience for Limbo. Thus began a series of four...
After nine long months of recovering from two foot surgeries, this walking fanatic is finally returning to his proper routine, including a short early morning walk, alone, during which I clear my mind of irrelevancies, organize my thoughts, and generally enjoy observing the world around me on its own terms, which is to say entirely without practical concerns, without the emotional mire of...
2019 has been a peculiarly difficult year for me in some ways. Most if not all of the trouble stems from an innocent moment of carelessness back in January. Specifically, on January 23rd, walking home from my office, I casually stepped out to cross the street at a busy corner — an intersection I cross every single day — and somehow my right...
As many of you know, I had surgery to repair a broken bone in my foot back at the end of January, an injury which severely curtailed one of my lifelong essential activities, walking. Well, August 9th here in Korea, I underwent Round 2 of this surgical adventure, removing the screw inserted during the first round. As a result of my current hospitalization,...
Kathy Zhu, a University of Michigan student who was recently crowned Miss World America, has been stripped of her title because she supports Donald Trump, she commented online about the rates of black-on-black gun violence, and — perhaps most serious of all given her home state — she refused to put on a hijab at a Muslim information booth’s “try on a hijab”...
I am back to where I started, trying to think and write in the midst of the cackling hollowness of the young and mindless — this time a gaggle of twenty-somethings shouting and laughing uproariously about the same nothingness with which teenagers had surrounded me two weeks before. Again I exhaust every resource of the mind in a life or death struggle against...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 12, 2019 · Last modified February 14, 2019
(If you have not done so, please read Part One and Part Two.) I concluded Part Two of this series with the challenge, directed at all my students, real and hypothetical: “Why are you living a life you don’t want?” In a sense, the answer is obvious: Because they don’t know what life they want. In fact, I believe the problem is even...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 1, 2019 · Last modified January 25, 2020
(See Part One) If the civilized life is akin to a long walk through nature — and that includes human nature — then its definitive character is not destinations, not “highlights,” but continuity. The key to continuity, in all matters of will, is the avoidance of distractions. Destinations, too, when regarded as definitive, become mere distractions. A destination is not only an end...
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