Sublime

A character’s conviction in their rightness and superiority is precisely what gives them their terrible power. Great drama often forms itself around a clash of competing hero-maker narratives, one belonging to the protagonist, the other to their foe. Their respective moral perceptions of reality feel utterly genuine to their owners and yet are

Our beliefs feel personal to us because they are us.

An air altogether of occupying a time not his own – might he be more at ease in an Edwardian dining room, say, or on a pitching clipper’s deck? Very likely.

Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People

As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is “to be free of other selves.”

As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’

specter.

curiosity weakens shame,

Isolated in our personalised digital worlds and unaware of the algorithms messing with our heads, we are losing our capacity to do what Aristotle called the proper human function: think.