Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
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...
From the travel diary of a visitor in the realm of the last man: But I always think of these moments of decision as being like a long, winding slide. Everyone enjoys a slide, so you gladly wait your turn, propped up by the familiar faces and encouraging words of those already in line, until you get your chance to sit at the...
“Say things as simply as possible” — in order to be understood as widely as possible. “Live in accordance with the norms of your society” — in order to be accepted. “Do not do what will be seen as inappropriate, foolish, or out of step by the people around you” — lest one be rejected or even condemned by others. “Keep up with...
I would rather live in exile and see things as they really are, with the clarity of distance and detachment, than end up dead in a Siberian prison camp because I thought I could fight the tyranny and “free my people” from the inside. Which approach is nobler? There is undeniably something spectacular in the latter choice. But does not true nobility eschew...
Cool (adj.): appealing to others’ fashionable tastes or preferences in such a way as to allow those others to feel that in liking you (the cool one), they are expressing their own independent and original minds.
In short, coolness is, to both the cool one and his admirers, merely a collectively aggrandizing euphemism…
How to know whether you are still alive.– Do you occasionally think something that cannot be communicated properly without discarding all stock phrases and standard “talking points” vocabulary? Better yet, do you occasionally catch yourself thinking something that, for all your sincerest efforts, cannot be communicated in any language you know? That is to say, do you sometimes feel trapped within an idea...
I ended a recent post with a Pythagorean ethical maxim. Since I happen to have been wandering in that territory of late, let us return to the Pythagorean school for another lesson. Today’s advice, like my previous example, is offered to us by the very late (5th Century AD) Macedonian writer Joannes Stobaeus, who collected various valuable quotations from ancient Greek writers, a...
Losing an audience, with all that this entails, is a window into the personal meaning of death. From feeling deeply associated with, or embedded within, one’s human surroundings and their processes, one undergoes a gradual and involuntary detachment. Slowly, one perceives one’s increasing ineffectualness in a world where one had once perceived oneself as a cause of movement and an object of others’...
In this era of popular psychological pseudoscience, which systematically mistakes context for causality, it is common to hear laments about men who beat their wives “because” their fathers beat their mothers, or children with drug-addicted parents who “inevitably” succumb to the habit themselves. It is certainly true that context, particularly intimate human context, influences character development and the relative visibility of available options,...
Follow: