"Reason for Being in The World": Recap and Return
Regular readers of Homo Vitruvius will recall that before I was interrupted in early summer by national events and my move, I was in the midst of the real-time composition, week to week, of my late-life “intellectual and spiritual accounting of identity.” Not a memoir of my private life, it serves rather as an account of my mental formation and my orientation toward meaning in the world — what shaped me not as I am in intimate relations but who I emerged to be in my facing out to the world, like the figure above, a product of those intellectual and personal experiences that I, in turn, shaped into both a personal and a public self. I purposely mix the directions of the shaping – experience forming me, I forming myself – because that is the recursive nature of self-development. And, of course, the intellectual and spiritual development is not disconnected from my more private being or history, a truth quite evident in the memoir. But unless you’ve experienced the mixed rewards of personal relationship with me, you likely don’t care about my intimate self, and this act of accounting, then, needs to speak beyond myself.
When I began what I originally called an “experiment,” I had in mind by that word the almost completely unplanned and real-time nature of the composition. Once I started, I quickly engaged in more thoughtful conceptual realization of what I intended, but, still, under the circumstances, that was very much on the fly. My ideas continued to evolve, and soon enough I resolved that what I first imagined as a small number of related essays would ultimately transform into a book I will publish, with a greater number of essays as chapters.
Among my earliest decisions about that final transformation was the thought of incorporating into the book two recent essays published shortly before I conceived of Reason for Being in the World. They are included in the recap below in the order they originally appeared. I haven’t yet decided how exactly I will absorb them into the full work. It will be clear in the reading of both and all how much they belong as part of this whole.
Another change I decided on is in the title. The original full title was “Welträson: Reason for Being in the World.” I derived the German welträson, for my purpose, from staaträson, a term that means, in a political sense (a) “reason of state.” In some uses, it seems to imply the sense of the French raison d'être, “reason for being,” or “justification for existence.” Welträson, in its only occasional usage, is translated as “reason of the world,” in different ways that formulation can be understood. (Isolated in translation, Google Translate renders it as “world reason,” which is Heideggerian and to my liking.) I’ve chosen, in my own inventive usage, to incorporate the sense of raison d'être, so that I am rendering it as “reason for being in the world.” The first chapter, detailing the influence of Martin Heidegger on my thinking, sheds more light on why I would appreciate the phrase “being in the world.” I then decided, since that first chapter publication, to remove welträson from the title of the full work and reserve it for the title of the concluding chapter only, in which a full accounting of how I came to choose the word converges with the culminating theme of the memoir.
The break of most of the summer and the creation of American Samizdat will have interrupted the continuity of anyone’s reading experience, as it interrupted my writing experience, though I have continued to do background research as I could. I thought, then, that before resuming publication of the memoir next week, I would offer these very brief recaps, with links, of the chapters so far. Before that, however, I have this important business — this request to make.
My newest readers will not know but older ones recall that several months back I ceased producing paid-member-only writing and the various special series that framed it all. I returned to offering my, I hope, signature variety of creative and intellectual content – essay, poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, literary analysis, and more, and all of it without a paid subscriber wall.
Next, after Reason for Being in the World, will be a serialized dramatic play.
The writing reserved behind the paywall — by this point, quite a lot — is that more than three months old. All newly published writing is offered regardless of subscription type.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate being paid. I would. I appreciate all readers, of course, paid or free. Like all writers, I want to be read. (The chances are good you’ve seen me say along the way, “You read; therefore, the writer exists.” It’s true.) But unlike some who publish on Substack as passionate avocation or are internet business models or who are financially indifferent to any income from the writing, writing is my vocation. I mostly don’t teach anymore, and I seek to earn income from my writing. I’ve addressed these subjects before, in multiple essays, including in some chapters of Reason for Being in the World.
So I’m asking, if you are a serious appreciator of my writing (I won’t say fan, I don’t have fans, no one is excited to spy me at the bar and snap a photo of me for TMZ – though I am a cut up over a martini) —
— and if you can afford it, to think of Homo Vitruvius (American Samizdat, too, if that’s your jam) as a volume at your local bookstore and consider paying for it. I’ll even offer something more in return — an actual, physical book. And since I know that secretly you actually do aspire to be a fan, I’ll affix my autograph. For the price of a one-year subscription, your choice of any one of three books is on included offer.
My 2021 poetry collection, Waiting for Word.
A copy of the 2015 Footnote: A Literary Journal of History, in which I was featured with a collection of my poetry and creative nonfiction.
A copy of the revised and complete, signed and numbered, in order of request, Reason for Being in the World in book form.
Now the synopses.
The two precursor essays:
Exit Interview
The significance to me of my life in education, as student and teacher.
A remembrance of the only grandparent I ever knew and her role in my father’s life.
Reason for Being in the World
1.
Formative influences in my life and my intellectual and spiritual development.
2.
The mystery to me of my foreign-born father’s early life and how my drive to know of it became a theme of my own life.
3.
My father’s first brush with death, the family’s late-life reunion in grateful togetherness, my interrupted journey to the shtetl of my father’s birth, my father dies.
4.
Boats Against the Current: Reason for Being in the World, Part 4
I complete the journey to my father’s shtetl, confront the history of Jewish life in Ukraine and of the Holocaust there. Now what?
Next: “Burn the Boats.”
If a full-year subscription isn’t manageable, consider a monthly subscription of only $5.
At a lower level, there is that invigorating shot of espresso you could treat me to (Intelligentsia Black Cat and Counter Culture Apollo are my go-tos.)
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
I'm not sure if it counts as one of your Welträson, Jay, but reading your work is a very good reason to be on Substack.
This summer, you've struck me as being a bit like a 17th-century English poet, retired to his garden to write and reflect, who one day hears outside the walls the clamour of civil strife and so re-enters the public fray.
Hah! Unsurprisingly, Jeffrey, you've chosen just the very apt formulation for how I've been feeling -- and delivered with it, in similarly 17th-century fashion, a suave compliment. A slightly less apt but more vigorous analogy might be Michael Corleone in Godfather III: with clenched fists, "Just when I thought I was out . . .." But that would be less seemly, so I'm sticking with yours.