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Escapes
C. S. Lewis was fond of saying that the only people opposed to escapes were jailers. In his classic essay, “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien made the same point at greater length: “Why should a man be...
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Nostalgia as Active Memory and Index of Our Desires
Below is an excerpt of an email exchange between myself and Mark Garcia, my very thoughtful friend who generously reads what I write on here. The exchange was occasioned by my earlier thoughts on...
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Capitalism, Magic, and Technology
In his chapter on the “cultural preparation” for the age of the machine in Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford cites, among other phenomenon, capitalism and magic. Here’s the abridged version:...
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On the Reading of Old Books
Following on the Christmas holiday, here is a little something that is, given the book from which it is taken, tangentially related. Both of these paragraphs are from C. S. Lewis’ Introduction to an...
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Too Visible to Be Seen
The late David Foster Wallace opened his well-regarded Kenyon College commencement address of 2005 with a joke*: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish...
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Strangers to Ourselves
For reasons that I probably do not myself fully understand, I am endlessly intrigued by discussions of the ever elusive state of being we call authenticity. At least part of the intrigue lies in how a...
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The Transhumanist Promise: Happiness You Cannot Refuse
Transhumanism, a diverse movement aimed at transcending our present human limitations, continues to gravitate away from the fringes of public discussion toward the mainstream. It is an idea that, to...
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