A week ago my father asked me, presumably because I was the only suitable philosophical authority within a few miles, what “Existentialism” is. Being the word-merchant that I am, I deftly replied, “uh…well, it was kind of started by Kierkegaard — though it’s not explicitly Christian — and it deals with big questions, like, um, […]
The Sunday Scaries: Reclaiming Our Day of Rest
We love to hate our alarms. There you are — peacefully lounging in a meadow, surrounded by friendly grizzly bears munching on grass. And then, just as Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett finish a rendition of “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”…BAM! A Soviet-era nuclear submarine surfaces in the middle of the meadow, uprooting trees and sounding […]
“Have a Token Lent” and Other Seasonal Suggestions from a Weary Jesuit
John L’Heureux was a Jesuit for 17 years before he quit in ’71 and got married. He’s also written an insane amount of fiction and poetry which I am slowly working through, and loving. I first encountered his work with The Rise and Rise of Annie Clark from a New Yorker issue last autumn and am […]
Sleeping the Pain Away: A Young Woman Takes a Chill Pill in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”
When asked about her favorite holiday, writer Ottessa Moshfegh says, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been on holiday…?” And then laughs. On the one hand, I suppose she could be speaking literally. But I take the above response as an invitation. Do human beings ever really relax? After all, we never catch a break […]
Sex and Death: The Existentialism of King Solomon and Ernest Hemingway
We live our lives bounded by those two mysteries, birth and death—our beginning and our end—and in between we stumble about in the dark, looking for the light, or at least for a good pair of existential shoes so we will not cut our feet quite so much on the sharp edges of Reality as […]
