Sublime

Many years ago I became fascinated by a rooster named Weirdo, who weighed over thirty pounds. His offspring, Ralph, was even bigger. The man who had raised these extremely aggressive animals had been forced to singe off their spurs with a blowtorch. Then I found Frank, a miniature horse, specially bred from sixteenth-century Spanish stock, who stoo

This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn’t my own invention.

‘He is a collection of tissues and cells delicately and intricately conjoined and brought to life for only an instant. It will take just one sharp collision or a fall to render them inanimate again,’ realises Rabih, the quiet hero of Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love. ‘He is only a visitor who has managed to confuse his self with the world. He h

Dan Rocker’s hard-to-learn lesson—that no one really notices even eccentric behavior, that you can mostly follow your star, or your zipper, without raising the eyebrows or attention of the Others, who are following their own—was true here, as it is everywhere.

Meanwhile, in the other camp, public philosophers such as Alain de Botton have sometimes risked derision to publish books or establish institutions designed to take a dry and analytical field back to its humanitarian roots. They have dared to remind us how the great thinkers of history might help us navigate our modern world contentedly and with mi

bathos