What my writing is really about
alecleach.substack.com
What my writing is really about
A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile. Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.” If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks. But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse
... See moreDavid Brooks • The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as “flourishing.” And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love.
James K. A. Smith • You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
More and more, I find myself turning to reading and writing to grapple with the fact that I only get to live out one life. Chewing on the cud of my one earthly existence lets me experience life once on the way down—as I go about my day and live it all in real-time—and once again on the way back up, when I regurgitate it back onto the page.
It’s a li
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These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection. When reading and writing, we feel connection happening (or not). That’s the essence of these activit
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
If, as I have been convinced, the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes of you, then it’s necessary to locate those places where history reaches through your self and sticks you to the board.