After a life spent dreading his inevitable death, Soren Kierkegaard — age 42 — finally succumbs. As he exhales his final breath, Soren feels released from his tormented life. At last! He can be with God, before God, as he believes is proper for every human being!
The Empty Plinth
Smashing objects precious to others has a long and illustrious history.
Reparations
It being Sunday in north Georgia, obviously, I was listening earlier to The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright on CBC Radio 1. The well-curated program ranged across what one would expect in a North America ripping itself into pieces, but there was a gem in the middle that tried to explain Modern Monetary Theory or MMT, a recently fashionable idea in economics. It’s not a difficult theory, really, and it is fundamentally correct. The theory is as follows:
Milestones
I didn’t realise this until I looked at the website statistics, but with Mark’s last post, we have now reached 150 essays posted to The Essence of Water. Given that we’ll celebrate our three year anniversary in about six weeks, that’s pretty impressive – about one essay a week, on topics from money, to provincial French cities, to swimming in Ireland, to breaking free and learning to study philosophy – and all of it of a common theme, of existing as ethical, moral individuals.
Show, don’t tell
The standard advice given to aspiring writers of fiction is that they should concentrate on describing as best they can the characters, the settings, and the events, but should allow their readers to draw for themselves inferences about what this all means. Long before Roland Barthes pronounced la mort de l’auteur, teachers of good style had made clear that the novelist should not try to make explicit the significance of their books, but should trust their audience to join the dots, in their own time and in their own way, to complete the picture. The obligation of the novel, wrote Javier Cercas, more recently, is not to answer the question it poses but to formulate it in the most complex way possible.