Some measure of insanity
Let me simply record this statement from Donald Winnicott, which I have taken from the end of Adam Phillips’ short book on the enigmatically wise child-doctor and psychoanalyst: If I…
Notes on the death of culture (Mario Vargas Llosa)
Mario Vargas Llosa reviews, in the overture to this work, four influential essays on the traumatic descent into death of culture, as he says, in the meaning traditionally ascribed to…
Life cycles
Our culture may lie in ruins; our republics may be distressed; our economies blackjacked by rentier financiers; our societies fissured with conflicts of identity; but at least our lives are…
Wallace Stevens’ mind of winter
Wallace Stevens is a poet for lovers of beauty among ruins. For those of us in the second half of life he is of unique importance: diligent insurance executive, sometimes…
Millenial predictions: return of totalitarianisms
Fernandez-Armesto’s second prediction was that rival totalitarianisms would return. This prediction was bravely conservative or pessimistic, when drafted a few short years after Fukuyama’s rush of hegelianism to the head…
Reclusive samizdat
To live authentically within the ruins of our culture today, to practise the ritual of writing solemnly, without regard for fame and fortune and the flickering nonsense of panel shows,…
The extinction of meaning
The solitary writer dwells in an oppressive fear; that the line of culture, the traditions, the teachings that his labors seek to preserve against the decay of all human institutions,…
An interlude on disaffection and living in truth
Yet again today I had the experience of feeling like I belonged nowhere and with no one in a room discussing political ideas. Yet again I felt disaffected from all…
Predicting population and initiative
Fernandez-Armesto’s first projection was that the world’s population would be contained. Was this projection, made twenty years ago, correct? The United Nations Population Division has published its World Poulation Prospects:…
Millennial predictions
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto at the end of his 1995 Millenium: a history of our last thousand years made five predictions. His predictions were coined self-consciously with the “trenchantly asserted” tone of futurology,…
The disenchantment of the world
I have long known this phrase – in German die Entziehung der Welt – from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and known it as the long…
The burning archive
The Burning Archive is the title of my work in progress collection of poetry. It is inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a painting of 1920, a world in which…
