Tag: Life
The proper study of mankind is not man, but life itself. Here I reflect on the exquisite art and profound paradoxes of modern existence.
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Day 5: The Dangers of a Useful Life
One finds it quite tiresome, this contemporary fixation with being ‘useful’. The world, it seems, has become a grand factory where every man and woman must justify their existence not by their elegance, but by their efficiency. The architect is praised for his functionality, the artist for his social commentary, and the mere human being…
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Day 3: The Tedium of Experience
It is a lamentable contemporary superstition that one must ‘live’ in order to write, or to create, or even to speak with any authority. We are besieged by the memoirs of those who have done little but suffer, and the art of those who insist on boring us with the banal details of their existence.…
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Day 1: The Tyranny of the Authentic
It is a curious and utterly tedious modern malady, this obsession with ‘authenticity.’ One finds it everywhere, like a particularly common cold—a rather unseemly affliction that has infected our society’s most sacred pursuits. This insistence upon raw truth over refined artifice has led to a great and lamentable decline. The artist, for instance, is no…