Beyond Thaumatophobia 3: The End of the Age of Reason: “[My father, a] lifelong materialist…was startled one day to hear his mother’s voice from the ground floor of his house, calling his boyhood nickname. That was a bit of a surprise, since she was 300 miles away at the time. Startled, he went to look, and found no one there. As he was turning to go back to his study, the phone rang; it was the retirement home where she spent her last years, telling my father that she had just died. I fielded a very flustered phone call not that many minutes later. He’d been blindsided by a universe that refuses to abide by our human notions of what can be real.”
Making the Bomb: “[Oppenheimer] is not a god, not death destroyer of worlds, but a man. An egotistical, cheating, selfish and driven man. He was also brilliant and delivered on a promise to the government and indirectly to the American people to create a weapon to end the war. ”
Mimetic Apocalypse: “According to [René] Girard, we need to follow Christ’s refusal to imitate any other man. This radical withdrawal from the mimetic system — which, for Girard, is embodied in the life and work of the 19th-century German poet Friederich Hölderlin — resembles in some respects Ernst Jünger’s ‘Anarch’ and ‘Forest Rebel’ (“Waldgänger”): a metaphysically idealized figure of a sovereign individual that overcomes the mimetic desires of this world. Girard does not provide any actionable worldly solutions, though. He ends his last book with an unsettling statement: ‘Violence can no longer be checked. From this point of view, we can say that the apocalypse has already begun.’ But perhaps we can detect in the silence that echoes from this sentence some hope. As Hölderlin put it: ‘But where there is Danger, Salvation also grows.'”
Reasons to be Optimistic About Architectural and Aesthetic Trends for the 2020s: “The new aesthetic of the 2020s seems to be some return to Postmodernism while not totally rejecting Modernism and minimalism either. Basically some fusion between Modernism and Postmodernism.”
The Spirit of the Samurai: “The samurai obsession with death is a truly unique element of their culture, one that begins with surface-level desensitization but actually runs much deeper. In fact, death was their single most important philosophical focus; it pervaded every action, every thought. The Hagakure, an eighteenth-century work on bushido, summarized it unceremoniously: ‘The way of the warrior is death.’ In a sense, this was completely accurate: the samurai was meant to see himself as a figure of living death, a long-dead man who propels himself forward only through courage and moral rectitude. The samurai was a man condemned, an executioner of enemies who himself was always teetering on the brink of destruction. Many have called samurai culture a death cult, and they’re not too far off.”
Why Are American Forests Like That? “What we have in this nation is an eternal tension between the American and his paradoxical place in the New World— a land that is not new but ancient, and where civilians routinely venture into the outside as outsiders themselves. Our national drama is the interplay of the foreigner on foreign soil. Here, man and the Wild are not just unfamiliar to one another, but also intensely adversarial. And the wilderness is the theater by which these equally threatening forces come into opposition.”
Why You Will Never Understand Blockchains: “…an ‘Intelligent Machine’ economy has the potential to upend thousands of years of human history and drive value in ways we can’t even imagine.”