exile
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No Save Point
I seem to have entered into a stage of life at which I find myself wrestling with regret more often than I might like. This doesn’t make me special in any way: generations of us humans, upon reaching a certain age, have said wistfully, “If I’d known then what I know now . . .”… Continue reading
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The Greatest Weight
As I wrestled with disorientation on my way back from Ohio, earlier this week, I recalled something that could serve as a counterweight, helping me to keep my balance and so to avoid sliding into regret and dwelling on what could have been. I first gave serious attention to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in… Continue reading
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Home/Not Home
I never feel more like an “internal exile” than when I have traveled from my current residence near Atlanta to the place where I grew up, just upstream from Toledo, Ohio, along the Maumee River. I took the long fall-break weekend to drive up I-75 to visit my mom, my siblings, and a few of… Continue reading
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Citizens of Nowhere
Preparing for a class session on Aristotle’s virtue ethics, I came across a passage in Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue that gets to the heart of the idea of my recent post, “Ethics for Exiles.” It concerns the role of friendship in ethics and in political life. Friendship of course, on Aristotle’s view, involves affection. But… Continue reading
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Ethics for Exiles
Following from the previous post – “Word and Flesh” – a thought that has followed me at least since graduate school has made itself known once more. I don’t think I’m ready to develop the thought in full – it might require a book! – but I should at last set the thought down in… Continue reading
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Word and Flesh
In 1989, Wendell Berry delivered a commencement address at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. With the aim of saying “something useful about the problems and opportunities that lie ahead” of the graduates, he started with a quotation from As You Like It, when Orlando says, “I can no longer live by… Continue reading