Reasoned arguments that contain implicit valuations of life, however coherent and compelling, are always in part explanations ex post facto of the instincts and temperament, personality, and character that influence every aspect of the experience of the individual. That is why two people can see life in entirely different ways,…
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…
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…
If we stop for a moment on a day’s journey, sagging onto a bench in an orange grove on a rainy day or a perfectly leveled tree stump in the middle of a clearing, we might start thinking chin-in-hand a la Rodin and slowly, after a while, realize something: we…
“The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed…
The close-set and benign features on the face of the Italian actor Ninetto Davoli seem to incarnate stupidity more completely than in any other actor that I’ve ever seen. It is almost uncanny, the perfect embodiment of a trait not always easy to bring out—and not always gratifying to bring…
