Anna B

I took a medium-sized bottle of Jim Beam and drank from it under the covers while reading No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton. Without God, we are no longer persons. We become dumb animals under pain, happy if we can behave at least like quiet animals and die without too much confusion.

One might have hoped to turn to philosophy for a clarification of the nature of truth, and maybe even a celebration of it. But philosophy of pragmatist, analytic and continental varieties lurched into the post-truth era a century ago.

On the one hand: “Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that we have grown wildly estranged from genuine wisdom or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility.

Everything that rises must converge, or not.

The excess clauses are sometimes replanted or grafted nearby, not disposed of entirely.

Four years after it first appeared, Woolf reprinted “On Being Ill”

She has been thinking about Hamlet , and the way rashness, “one of the properties of illness,” allows at last a proper, because “outlaw,” reading of the play’s illogic and excess

Mindfulness is not about achieving or gaining, it’s about acceptance and the relinquishing of material desire. When you’re charging $10 a month with the promise of a ‘better life’, can you really be holding true to that compassionate and egalitarian vision?