Welcome, lovely solitude for longer, easier work times, since the college kids (undergrads) are gone from neighborhood ambiance for a whole month.
Dec. 16
Days go by… “saga of crafting life” (below) resulted from dwelling with a singer’s particular song which was evidently in the wake of a broken love. My non sequiturs respond to specific points in her song.
My occasioned posting on Heidegger, “engaged being,“ coincidently complements my above pretense of sagacity.
Nov. 28
Imagination: a short introduction: Idealization of imagination tends to conceal a wider reality of a flourishing life that employs imagination prudently. Otherwise, imagination can get out of hand. Nonetheless,
the idea of Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei’s The Life of Imagination inspired “a creative life” below. At present, she’s writing a little book in the Oxford U.P series Short Introductions, which will have the title above.
Anyway, “a creative life” (March 2019)—a major project—is now listed on my cohering.net home page (at the bottom there). The past 2+ years, it stayed largely hidden via some links within sundry postings.
Nov. 27
The ultimacy of the universe will be forever unknown. So, the ultimate point of Our form of life is ours to design, making time worthwhile,
at best cultivating humanity lastingly.
The originator of Positive Psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(“Me-high Chick-sent-me-high”), died last month, 87. “His” empirically well-established domain (by now, 30+ years after its founding) has had a profound influence on professional psychology, on my development, and continues to flourish—I noted today—for interdisciplinary humanities.
The NYTimes obituary didn’t represent “his” field fairly (so, I won’t link to that). I wrote to one of his sons (who is a local acquaintance):
His notion of The Evolving Self [a major book of his that influenced me] involves a rich sense of belonging actively in the flourishing of life—one’s life in life itself.
Flow is not, as the Times puts it, “a state of mind.” It’s a way of engaged being: dynamic, not homeostatic (not a “state”). Mihaly, with his colleague Seligman, advanced conceptions of engaged flourishing far beyond the idea’s origin in Aristotle (eudaimonia).
Nov. 19
The week has been intense. Last Saturday, I believed I’d be ready to start something long (many postings as part of my well-ordered project), but that became discursive letters (emails) to five different-worlded scholars: literary, intellectual historial, humanistic psychological, philosophical, and political.
My modal moments could be synthesized into a singular, protean thing, but I want to move on.
Next Saturday, I’ll be ready for my New Beginning (he said).
Full moon tonight behind wispy clouds in strong autumn wind tropes foreboding. Yet, I’m enthralled.
