Sublime

At the core of the human person is the soul, and it yearns to be fed and nurtured.

In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s mi

He needs a world with a robust countervailing understanding of personhood and contribution and community in it, human values that are alive and operational outside the logic of the market and its insistent clock. He needs it, and so do the rest of us.

The afflicted unmask the lie that what makes life worth living and God worth knowing are the pleasures I can wrench from my days.

“The point of full personhood … is this: that whoever finds out what is, for him, good and holds fast to it becomes whole.”

What if, buried in your ambition, is a desire for something more, someone else? Might that explain the persistent disappointment?

As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading toward the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the

the individual;