Sunday, August 30, 2009

I've lost you, as I move on



I’m sorry, but I can’t wait. Trust that I’ll keep sending updates along the way.

Remember that email I sent with the subject line "I went crazy..." that you trashed unread? It wasn’t about you. The subject line’s sentence was completed about a book I felt desperate to find among all the boxes of my stored books. It was about an obsession with literary calling I can’t satisfy.


Thursday, August 27, 2009

play everlasting



I’m deeply affected by the Event of Ted Kennedy’s death—as a very public death, as a Kennedy death, and as American Event.

As American Event: Not merely an American event rightly spread all over the news cycle, it’s a story of the dependence of democracy on leadership that can be irreplaceable.

Saturday, August 08, 2009

a fulfilling life is a good life



In Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot is haunted by Wittgenstein:

“For one recalls [which she does several times in her short book] Wittgenstein's famous death-bed insistence that he had had a wonderful life....Interpreted in terms of happy states of mind it would, however, have been very puzzling indeed if a life as troubled as his had been described as a good life. What Wittgenstein said rang true because of
the things he had done, with rare passion and genius, and especially
on account of his philosophy. Did he not say elsewhere ‘The joy
of my thoughts is the joy of my own strange life’?”

(p. 85 of NG, quoting Norman Malcolm quoting LW)