Latest News
Kitchen Chat and more…
Kitchen Chat and more…
Philosopher Dien Ho suggests that life as a zombie might help us achieve some of our aims:
In some respects, the idea that becoming a zombie is a bad thing borders on a platitude. Zombies wander around in constant hunger in a semi-decomposed state. Their actions are guided entirely by impulses. They seem to lack the complex cognition that’s critical for most of the activities we consider worthwhile – social interactions, intellectual pursuits, personal projects, etc. But in other respects, the life of a zombie has characteristics many of us strive mightily to achieve. Their lives are highly centralized and simplified, since their needs and wants often revolve around just a few things, like brains or human flesh. They are largely indifferent to pain and suffering. Short of severe head injuries, zombies enjoy a type of immortality. Zombies do not care about most of the pesky concerns that fill our daily lives: they do not care about the weather, their appearance, their social status, their retirement plan, their morning commute, and petty office politics. They are not concerned about the threat of terrorism, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. And they certainly do not become jealous, depressed, worrisome, or suffer the other anxieties that regularly plague our waking moments. Indeed, if we focus on just these qualities, the life of a zombie resembles the ideal state of a disciplined Zen Buddhist monk who has managed to let go of his earthly concerns.
On Walt Whitman’s birthday, a little poem:
And who art thou? said I
to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer,
as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth,
said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land
and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d,
altogether changed, and
yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies,
dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only,
latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night,
I give back life to my own origin,
and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place,
after fulfilment, wandering,
Reck’d or unreck’d, duly with love returns.
Professor Christy Wampole notes that the essay form has become very personal:
Essayism consists in a self-absorbed subject feeling around life, exercising what Theodor Adorno called the “essay’s groping intention,” approaching everything tentatively and with short attention, drawing analogies between the particular and the universal. Banal, everyday phenomena — what we eat, things upon which we stumble, things that Pinterest us — rub elbows implicitly with the Big Questions: What are the implications of the human experience? What is the meaning of life? Why something rather than nothing? Like the Father of the Essay, we let the mind and body flit from thing to thing, clicking around from mental hyperlink to mental hyperlink: if Montaigne were alive today, maybe he too would be diagnosed with A.D.H.D.
The essayist is interested in thinking about himself thinking about things. We believe our opinions on everything from politics to pizza parlors to be of great import. This explains our generosity in volunteering them to complete strangers. And as D.I.Y. culture finds its own language today, we can recognize in it Arthur Benson’s dictum from 1922 that, “An essay is a thing which someone does himself.”