Art & Literature

Montaigne, Twitter, and the Public Diary

By Eve Poirier – Winner of Philosophy in the Wild ‘This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one.’1 On 16 March 2022, Twitter user @nicolerichle tweeted: ‘just saw someone w 52.9k tweets and 3 followers’2. TheContinue reading “Montaigne, Twitter, and the Public Diary”

Life as Art: What Radiohead Can Surprisingly Teach You About Confidence

By Virgil Munteanu In the summer of 2021, I signed up for a short course in directing held at a well-known film school in London. One day, as we were all watching our short films, we eventually came to an evil cop-noir made by a fellow attendee. It started out rather unconventionally with a descendingContinue reading “Life as Art: What Radiohead Can Surprisingly Teach You About Confidence”

Keramos

The last vestiges of our fire’s embers had started to fade again; so tindered crumpled papyrus and then olive wood chunks to keep the night warm (incandescence beneath a gleaming firmament). By this point we had long left Benedictus’ atrium; I cannot but think prosaic conversation with (alleged) ideologues is a greater sedative than Posca (that wine they infuse with opium). I can just about recall the conversation I had with Remus on Politics, and his insistence that the (recent) death of Agrippa Postumus was an instance of posthumous filicide on the part of Augustus, as opposed to the more obvious truism that Tiberius wanted no political outliers.

How would we live if we lived forever?

Death is more than the sudden end of our subjective experience. It is also the promise that all of our actions and projects will one day fade into nothing- a gradual annihilation. We do not etch our names into the bedrock of the earth, we can only build sandcastles to be washed away in the coming tide. Action as the decisive, irrevocable, sole cause of change has never been possible.