Nietzsche was right: what is best and what is worst in us are often inseparable. The artist whose aesthetic gift and sensitivity make her impractical and unambitious; the lawyer whose intense drive and gift for dialectic make him single-minded and ungenerous; the man of wealth and power whose vast resources…
Many of the goals that people pursue have less to do with the pursuit itself than with the pursuit as a means of externalizing a self-perception and aligning their own idealized self with the self defined and perceived by the world. Goals then become the sublimation of a desire not…
An adage famously ascribed to the mythologist Joseph Campbell says that we desire not so much the meaning of life as the feeling of being alive. But that is a false dichotomy based on the generalization that we are feeling rather than thinking beings. The truth is that we are…
It is a sad day when a person gains enough insight and understanding to situate every individual on a much longer timeline. People’s ambitions evanesce in a puff of smoke. Self-importance begins to seem like sadism. Even presidents and world leaders shrink to the dimensions of a tiny photo with…
Upon reaching a certain stage of life, usually after the age of 30 but always when enough time has elapsed to make you wonder about the slowly accumulating rubbish heap of your past, regrets come up as an infallible sign that you are getting older. You start to hem and…
If there is a collective stupidity in the modern world, a tragicomedy peculiar to developed countries and played out ad nauseam in the media and popular culture, it is that of our perception of the human lifespan, which is just long enough for people to kid themselves about its laughable…
A person’s individuality is like an unfinished puzzle. But while some people have pieces aplenty and have managed to place them into a coherent order that has all the makings of an actual picture, others have only a few pieces scattered around or none at all—or what’s worse, the wrong…
Writing is an apparently simple act. The person doing the writing puts words in order, one after another, line by line, adding squiggles and dots here and there to make the appropriate pauses before concluding with a mighty flourish: I am a writer, says the person who has written. And…
Although many on the Internet might doubt the vigor and even the courage of the average keyboard warrior, that little amoeba squirming in the dark, I have no doubt that these are only warriors according to their own tattered and abused definition. Upon a bit of consideration and not a…
Q: What is transcreation? A: Transcreation as a word combines two different words: translation and creation. But the word creation as such is something of a misnomer; transcreation can be more readily understood as a combination of copywriting and translation, amounting to a kind of creative adaptation of a text…