Enjoying the view from Limbo
Enduring fame is either an emblem of vulgar vanity or an indication of past virtue. In either case, vanity or virtue, the remnant is generic, in that it can in no way reveal what is personal or individual in the doer, but rather, if anything, obscures it even more completely than the mists of time can obscure the person who remains “unaccomplished” and...
Friends.– No one has fewer natural friends than the tyrant, who is rivalled in this only by the philosopher — the former to the extent that he has reduced his soul to nothing but vested interests, the latter to the extent that he has expunged his soul of vested interests. The tyrant falls farthest away from the conditions that make true friendship possible;...
The imaginary body.— To worship pleasure is to empower pain, which in turn is to elevate the body and its distractions to the status of self-identity. But if I am my body, then I do not exist, for the body is merely the soul’s imaginary postulate of a hypothetical space radically distinct from space in general. Body is real; my body is not....
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 28, 2025 · Last modified September 3, 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...
Rule of thumb.— Authority should never be in the hands of those who want it. The principle of decentralization.– The level of authority one human being has over another should be directly proportional to the level of personal interest and affection that defines their relationship. Hence, parents and other family elders ought to be the primary authorities in every child’s life, friends and...
There is a natural breaking point in human connection, a borderline beyond which all goes slack, from which point the closer we are, the more distant we become. Intimacy is misunderstood as the elimination of all barriers and distance. In fact, it depends utterly upon the maintenance of natural distance. Intimacy exists in the tension between our need for distance and our willingness,...
“I see you are alone, so you are not busy.” False. One is never busier than when alone, for then one is surrounded by the incessant demands of all those complex ideas and secret projects that tend to sit quietly in dark corners and leave you to your own devices when you are in the company of humans. “Are you busy this weekend?”...
I once had more readers in any given week than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard had in their entire lives, combined. I lost all those readers by choice, or rather I should say by lack of any agreeable alternative. The thought of “keeping them” was revolting, given what I would have had to do to myself to achieve that end. I now write — as...
“I have lost more friends over the past six years than I even knew I had.” False. For you cannot lose a friend. You can only lose illusions. To “lose a friend” is merely to realize that there was no friend. That is a pure gain; an evolution from ignorance to knowledge. Better no true friends than a hundred illusions. “What in the...
He whose instinct is to wince when you hurt yourself, to warn you when he sees danger ahead, to shed a tear for your heartbreak, to remind you (whether gently or brusquely) of your reason when you become confused, and to offer a hand when you are frightened to face this moment alone, is…
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