Sublime

‘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

We are frequently the very last people to know what is at work within ‘us’. We suffer because there is no easy route to introspection. We cannot open a hatch and locate ‘ourselves’. We are not a fixed destination, but an eternally mobile, boundless, unfocused, vaporous spectre whose full nature can only be retrospectively deduced from painfully rec

self-abnegating

There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.

traipse

inscrutable

Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.

banality