Enjoying the view from Limbo
The purpose of art is to reveal truth. Not facts, not slogans, not trendy attitudes, and certainly not the ephemeral feelings or passions of the artist himself. Truth, meaning something unchanging and essential to a proper understanding of some element of reality, whether regarding human nature, the structures of civil order, or the ordering principles of the cosmos. Anything, therefore, which purports to...
Xi Jinping, at the G20 summit — why a communist murderer is even allowed to attend an international economic conference in the first place is one of those questions that can only be answered by adopting a resigned “Such are the times we live in” frame of mind — expresses anger that his private chastisement of Justin Trudeau, whose country’s political system China...
Recently, two radicalized children threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery. They supposedly did this to protest the continued reliance on fossil fuels. Perhaps their reasoning was that Van Gogh painted in oil, which means he too contributed to global warming in some way. Otherwise, their defining “statement” as they glued themselves to the wall beneath the famous painting...
One of the inevitable consequences of nihilism is that even people of talent, who might have made something worthwhile in a world in which societies were united by beliefs and aspirations of substance, end up producing nothing but clever variations on the prevailing nothingness — not commentaries on that nothingness, or critiques of it, but merely the nothingness itself, disguised in various excesses....
If all the simpletons and halfwits magically disappeared from the Earth, society would be infinitely more rational; but then who would do the menial jobs, such as practicing modern medicine, banking, leading our largest churches, and inventing the internet? Plato’s great political insight, the founding wisdom of political philosophy itself: The only men intellectually and temperamentally suited to rule are precisely the ones...
The world’s current fidgeting over rising energy prices amid the Russian war of attrition in Ukraine, as though our daily convenience is reason enough to let a rabid tyrant go ahead and blow out the doors of his cage, got me to thinking what a wonderful metaphor this impending “energy crisis” has become for so much of what has gone miserably wrong with...
Life imitates art.– When fiction is transformed by circumstances and attentive subjectivity into the reader’s own self-revelation, it effectively ceases to be fiction, and becomes something more like figurative memoir. Hence, I may say without any hint of hubris or exaggeration that as of this moment, Brave New World is my autobiography, The Trial my last few diary entries, and Invasion of the...
I have no time for people who tell me the profit motive is freedom, or that greed is a virtue. The profit motive is merely one of a thousand reasons to act in the state of freedom — certainly a practically useful reason, but hardly definitive of the state of freedom, anymore than what Aristotle calls useful friends (co-workers, regular customers) are definitive...
I prefer feeling anxiously alone to feeling safely swaddled within a crowd. I prefer ideas that leave me uncomfortable in my weakness to ideas that satisfy my weakest inclinations. I prefer looking at things squarely to rounding off the edges of my vision for the sake of stability. I prefer the constant hum of disquiet that comes of acknowledging the vast unknown to...
Tired of being right all the time, bored of having all his interpretations verified and all his predictions realized, seeking the challenge of subjects in which the answers are not so obvious to one who merely turns off the chatter and listens to his own reason for five minutes, erstwhile political commentator takes a break to look at things that actually matter, and...
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