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On the Melancholy of Unfinished Books and the Libraries We Carry Inside Us
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There is a particular grief that belongs only to the reader: the grief of the book you will never finish. Not because it is bad — the bad book is abandoned without ceremony — but because life intervened, or the mood passed, or you set it down one evening meaning to return and somehow never did. It sits on the shelf now, a bookmark still lodged somewhere in the middle third, a small monument to the person you were when you began it.
Continue Reading →Philosophy
The Examined Life and Its Discontents: Socrates Was Not a Happy Man
We have been sold a comfortable lie about the examined life. Socrates did not die peacefully. He died because he would not stop asking questions.
Aesthetics
Why We Still Need the Sublime: Burke, Kant, and the Algorithm
The sublime was always about the encounter with something that exceeds comprehension. We have not run out of such things. We have simply stopped looking.
History
The Scriptorium at Night: What Medieval Monks Thought About While Copying
The marginalia they left behind — drawings of rabbits, complaints about the cold, small jokes — tell us more about the medieval mind than any official chronicle.
Literature
Against Summaries: On the Irreducibility of the Novel
A novel cannot be summarised without being destroyed. The summary is not the novel any more than the recipe is the meal. This is not a flaw. It is the point.