Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 7, 2025 · Last modified March 10, 2025
Last May, I took a stab at translating Jorge Luis Borges’ excellent poem, “Mirrors,” the voice and ideas of which I believed had not quite been captured by the previous translations I had read. It does not follow from this that I succeeded in capturing the poem’s essence any better than my predecessors; I am merely explaining my reasons for trying. You may...
Books / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 25, 2025 · Last modified February 26, 2025
A question from an ambitious student, paraphrased: What makes poetry poetry? In other words, what are the defining features of a poem that distinguish it from other forms of verbal or written communication? The easiest answer, and probably the one you would find most often in any quick internet search of this question, is that poetry, unlike non-poetry, is written in verse form,...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 18, 2025 · Last modified February 21, 2025
Occasionally, one happens upon a certain page of classic literature at a strikingly appropriate moment, such that its evergreen insights appear to have fallen directly into one’s immediate midst and experience like a gracious snowfall of cleansing wisdom, leaving one feeling almost as though a long-dead author had mysteriously inserted this commentary into his work anachronistically, or just yesterday, for your personal benefit....
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 6, 2025 · Last modified February 8, 2025
The annoying thing about unrestrained government authority is that it does not magically become beneficial when it happens to fall into the hands of the faction you prefer. The insidious thing about unrestrained government authority is that it invariably appears to have become a beneficial thing when in the hands of the faction you prefer. Everything political leaders do is questionable, because only...
Elon Musk, as I have previously discussed here, has been widely accused of giving a Nazi salute to his fellow Trump supporters, said accusation consisting in an object lesson in establishing a truth by dint of endless repetition of a blatant lie. For the video clip of the supposed neo-Nazi outrage is readily available for all to see, although I am quite sure...
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 28, 2025 · Last modified January 29, 2025
Listening to a friend’s description of a disappointing social engagement with a former work colleague, in which she confessed, though without any great sense of self-recrimination, that she herself was “being boring” during that evening’s dinner conversation, I was compelled to reflect upon my own life as a social entity, such as it is, or rather to reflect on the sense in which...
There is no art without limits. Absolute freedom of expression, attractive as it may be as a theoretical principle, ought never to be allowed into the arena of artistic endeavor. Art thrives on finding ways to imply what cannot be said and to reveal new beauty within the constraints of existing forms — and existing norms. Even the artists whom we have come...
Cause and effect. — Prod people into desperation by denying and disemboweling everything they ever held dear. When they actually become desperate and begin to act as desperate men do, accuse them of being extremists and assert the need for stern measures to tamp down their irrational outbursts. Voter’s dialectic. — “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me...
Beware the biographer who presumes to imply that he understands his subject’s mind and thought, or can explain to us how his subject’s private life affected his work. Such a biographer, in an act of the worst sort of egalitarian envy, is daring to place himself on the same level as his subject…
Self-refuting bromide.– “Everyone does it.” Even if that were true in principle in some circumstance, it would become false the moment an intelligent person heard it, since he would immediately and instinctively commit himself to being a counterexample. For by definition, “what everyone does” is either a trivial material necessity (and therefore beyond the purview of such a moral declaration) or a mindless...
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