everything is illuminated

What if we shift the question from ‘who do I want to be?’ to the question, ‘what kind of life do I want to live with others?’? It seems to me that then many of the questions you pose about happiness, but perhaps also about ‘the good life’ – very ancient yet urgent philosophical questions – take shape in a new way. If the I who wants this name or seeks to live a certain kind of life is bound up with a ‘you’ and a ‘they’ then we are already involved in a social struggle when we ask how best any of us are to live.

The name – of it – is “Autumn” – The hue – of it – is Blood

“Virginia Woolf had her own term for such ‘shocks’ of memory. She calls them ‘moments of being,’ and they become essential to our very sense of self. They are the times when we get jolted out of our everyday complacency to really see the world and all that it contains. This shock-receiving capacity is essential for the writer’s disposition. ‘I hazard the explanation,’ she writes, ‘that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. … I make it real by putting it into words.’ Woolf’s early moments of being, the vivid first memories from childhood, are of the smallest, most ordinary things: the pattern of her mother’s dress, for example, or the pull cord of the window blind skittering across the floor of their beach house.”

towards a gentle academic

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?