Enjoying the view from Limbo
They do not know you. They cannot understand. But neither do they ignore you as you wish they would. “Why don’t you live as we do?” they ask, half-perplexedly, half-critically. You have two choices here: Drop your head, lower your voice, and reply meekly, “I don’t know”; or look them in the eye and say, “I don’t want to live your way.” “Aren’t...
Looking back over the past year’s Top Ten List of the most frequently read articles on this website, I am most intrigued by the sheer unpredictability of the entries. Some of the most popular reads are longer, more complex theoretical discussions, which is very gratifying, as it heartens me to think I have found the twenty or thirty humans out there who still...
As regular readers may have noticed, I occasionally like to revive an older article here in Limbo, either because it has suddenly become topical due to current events, or simply because it deals with themes of a more timeless nature, and in a way that I think deserves to be brought back into the foreground. In other words, the pieces brought back for...
I woke up this morning (Korean time) to the sad news that Notre-Dame de Paris was in flames, on the verge of being destroyed, with untold treasures lost forever, not to mention millions of French Catholics still in shock. Naturally, my first thought, upon absorbing the significance of this event, was “I have to write about this immediately!” I started thinking, “What could...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 31, 2018 · Last modified January 2, 2019
Two thousand eighteen, upon any honest reflection, must be judged to have been a year of robust and energetic activity for the forces of tyranny, inhumanity, and vulgarism. In other words, it was yet another year — and perhaps more than just “another year” — of predictable failure for freedom, character, and taste. In short, the body is winning, the soul losing; earth...
Is he lonely here? Or do the empty spaces define his freedom? On September 14, my old internet haunt Trump is God — okay, it’s still officially called American Thinker, for reasons of nostalgia, I suppose — ran a piece by one Frank Hawkins, an octogenarian, entitled, “The 10 Greatest Americans of My 8 Decades.” I read the title. I stifled a retch....
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 8, 2018 · Last modified September 12, 2018
Once, during my third year of university, I had the following dream: I was playing baseball in the parking lot of my childhood church with a group of youngsters whom I had known through junior high school, but had not seen for years. It was late at night, and oddly silent, but despite the darkness our game seemed to be carrying on without...
There are Chinese towns near the border with North Korea that send rice across the Yalu River in exchange for girls to marry. It makes sense. North Korea needs rice, because communist farming is a failure. China needs girls, after thirty years of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide. And this neat little arrangement in an obscure corner of the East holds an important...
Those who have been forcibly divested of their natural liberty by tyrants must be pitied. They have been coerced into accepting lies of security and state beneficence as paltry compensation for the loss of their birthright of a life worthy of human beings. And yet such wretchedness of external conditions, though destroying a man’s practical life, does not destroy the man. More wretched...
“Property is theft.” Proudhon’s classic anarchist paradox is more than a catchy slogan for international leftism. It encapsulates a complete and comprehensively absurd view of humanity, one which finds its contemporary apotheosis in President Obama’s more prosaic rendition, “You didn’t build that.” In other words, “You didn’t build that” is just “Property is theft” without the irony. By speaking his true mind without...
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