Enjoying the view from Limbo
Jesus walked among the lepers and touched them. Today, by contrast, we are urged to treat the quite healthy but merely “unvaccinated” as worse than lepers — as social outcasts to whom we shall not even grant the small dignity of delivering them baskets of food. And not only must we not touch our unclean ones, but we are not to speak of...
My attitude toward the crowd is neither sympathy nor a craving to be understood, but rather retreat: to my privacy, to my separate space, to the few companions whom I can teach or from whom I can learn, to the rare authors (nearly all dead) who deepen my intellect, to my developmentally beneficial errors and failures, to my unanswered questions, and to the...
My personal favorites among my essays are typically those which address universal and timeless themes of human existence — philosophical questions, to put it simply. On the other hand, it often happens that the items most popular with readers, at least upon initial appearance, are those which deal with matters of a more immediate and topical nature. People naturally get riled up over...
Every page of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offers something profound, something personally challenging, something lovely, or something disputable in the most ennobling sense of the word, namely the sense of engaging the reader in thoughtful discussion with a deeply probing and relentlessly frank mind. Interestingly, the work — actually a collection of short observations written for himself, rather than for a public...
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 28, 2018 · Last modified January 13, 2019
I live in Korea, so I was sleeping when Thursday’s senate hearing began. When I awoke, around 2:30am Korean Time, I decided to put on headphones and listen to some of the hearing to put myself back to sleep. (Political posturing usually has that effect on me.) Instead, I heard several minutes of bland clumsiness from the GOP’s female prosecutorial mouthpiece questioning Christine...
From the “truer words were never spoken” file, a few wise aphorisms from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up, and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others. (II.6) The best...
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