Enjoying the view from Limbo
No one intuits the basic moral tenor of an age more clearly than those with a vested professional interest in accommodating themselves to that tenor for personal gain, such as advertisers and other pitchmen. If you want to understand the moral condition and collective priorities of your social environment, spend a day analyzing the advertising techniques and campaigns most pervasive in the mass...
If every single Republican in Washington, D.C. over age fifty tests positive for COVID-19, and not a single one of them dies or even becomes critically ill, will the media still try to cite this spread as evidence that America needs more lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and mass hysteria to save us from this deadly contagion? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. In...
I am the last person to go around denigrating a person’s dying wishes, let alone advising that anyone ignore or outright refuse to respect a person’s dying wishes. As Milan Kundera says in his excellent musing on artistic intentions, Testaments Betrayed, if a farmer on his death bed tells his son not to cut down the old tree next to the house, we...
Today, hundreds of millions of men and women from most of the nations of the developed world have been herded into mass hysteria and precipitous panic over a virus outbreak that has proved to be no more ravaging than a bad flu season, an illness that is having its severest effects mostly among the small proportion of the population that is already at...
One of the paradoxes of this age that has forfeited all belief in a reality beyond immediate sense perception, and all humanity beyond the material mechanism, is that people, though no longer believing they exist, have become hysterically obsessed with prolonging their “life” (i.e., their illusory appearance of self-moving unity) regardless of the cost. No price is too high to pay for a...
An enthusiastic and diligent student who has been studying Plato with me for several months — we were in the middle of a close analysis of Book III of the Republic several weeks ago, when coronavirus “social distancing” interrupted our conversation — sent me an e-mail yesterday to share his distress over the current situation. You know, students like me don’t know how...
Throughout these months of trumped-up mass hysteria over the Pandemic that Ate a Planet, the progressive paternalists and their slavish multitudes have masked the dishonorable motives behind their drive to lock down entire nations and shut down entire economies — power lust in the case of the paternalists, mortal fear for their own physical existence in that of the slaves — with one...
A few new thoughts on the current state of things, proffered to those visiting this site for the same reason I maintain it, namely as an increasingly rare port in an increasingly violent storm. In other words, these are thoughts for the happy few, we lonely and “socially-distanced” holdouts for reason and civility in a world gone stark raving mad. “We have to...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 5, 2019 · Last modified October 8, 2019
Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite modern writers, published two distinct but similar poems called “Limits,” dealing with roughly the same philosophical theme, namely the gradual narrowing of our remaining experience as we grow older. I wish to discuss the shorter of the two poems, which, although less well-known, is the one I prefer. I begin with Borges’ work itself, which I...
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 18, 2018 · Last modified November 20, 2018
I received an e-mail from one of my sisters this morning, informing me that my oldest living uncle died last night, “peacefully in his sleep.” Peacefully in one’s sleep seems like a good way to go. It lacks poignancy and drama, to be sure. But the poignant and dramatic death is, it seems to me, too highly prized among humans — and only...
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