Tag: mortality

• On Ligotti, Watts, time, and the fractal self (July 6, 2026)

  How a grim philosophy and a dead animal conspired to cripple my ego.

• I’ve been reading some Stoics (December 18, 2022)

  Chewing through a half-dozen works on the virtue of leaving alone what you can't change.

• Watts as balm against hard feelings (December 31, 2020)

  A second of contemplating basic interconnectedness can soothe social burns.

• I understand Everything better now (December 15, 2020)

  Exploring books by Alan Watts lets me better appreciate the message of "Everything", David O'Reilly's oblique video-game masterpiece from 2017.

• Our Mathematical Universe and the eternal now (January 19, 2020)

  An excellent recent work of popular cosmology accidentally gives fresh insight on concepts certain Eastern religions have taught for centuries.

• I read David Ferry’s Gilgamesh (May 28, 2017)

  Found this one on a remaindered-books table beneath The Strand during my most recent Manhattan trip. I’d never read the Epic of Gilgamesh in any format other than Wikipedia summaries before, so it seemed an apt purchase for the train ride home. Ferry’s work reads as smoothly as its cover-copy promises. Through it I found the epic to resemble, more than anything else, a thoroughly relatable black comedy focusing on ol’ Gil’s larger-than-life cluelessness: Derek Zoolander as demigod, too thrillingly stupid to know the futility of seeking immortality.

• I read the Fragments of Heraclitus (November 30, 2016)

  I read it twice, in fact: first as an elegant little volume translated by the American poet Brooks Haxton, and then again on Wikisource, based on a 1912 translation and maintained by the website’s omninonymous hivemind.

• Writing on Schopenhauer’s schedule (April 26, 2015)

  I have suggested in the recent past that this blog’s triggering event involved the time that my cat engaged in cut-up poetry, but further reflection suggests I oversimplified things a bit. The VoodooPad document I mentioned in my last post, the one that holds all my loose project ideas, also acts as a personal journal. Every month I add a new page to the file, naming it according to the non-ISO-compliant pattern YYYYMM. Within it, for the whole of that month, I note thoughts that seem worth saving somewhere, but don’t seem appropriate for a more specific location, nor deserving of an audience beyond myself.