Authenticity

Honesty is a strange aesthetic criterion to prioritize. Great confessional art was never about accurately representing reality, but about giving voice to the process of experiencing it—how we feel, not what we’re feeling, making lucid that which usually eludes full expression.

I heard this quote from the writer Harold Brodkey who said, “I don’t understand privacy.” I’ve always understood privacy very well, but it’s like—what’s the point of taking your secrets to the grave, or even your banalities? We have this chance to let ourselves be known to other people, to fill out the web of humanity that we’ve been spreading for

When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, movements like Theosophy offered a kind of third way, a path toward understanding the world between science and religion. Theosophy was in conversation with both realms, using tools like magical