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'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.
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.