12 Things I Learned from Rene Girard: “By desiring the same thing as our neighbor, we are drawn into inevitable conflict. Mimetic desire turns into mimetic rivalry—in everything from love to war. That’s the reason for the injunction against ‘coveting your neighbor’s wife.’ Girard claims this is emblematic of how mimetic impulses destroy a community….
Tag: silence
weekend links: death cults, wilderness, eternal tension
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,…
Terra Damnata
What follows is a list of stray words and quotes that I highlighted for my own reasons while reading Blood Meridian a couple years ago. I’m sharing them because their aesthetic value is inherently high but also because, in aggregate their strangeness and desolate aesthetics are enhanced. They also act like luminol on my brain…
Hung Upon the Torturing Tree
sharing more Chesterton, randomly A Prayer in Darkness, by GK Chesterton This much, O heaven—if I should brood or rave, Pity me not; but let the world be fed, Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead, Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave. If I dare snarl between this sun and…
The Sword I Swing Falls Shattering From the Sky
Sharing Chesteron‘s The Last Hero, just because. The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day, There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away, And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide, Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and…
Baudrillard: “America”
Taking inventory of my summer reading. Here are some favorite passages from Jean Baudrillard‘s “America.” (Emphases mine.) Driving This sort of travel creates its own peculiar type of even and innervation, so it also has its own special form of fatigue. Like a fibrillation of muscles, striated by the excess of heat and speed, by…