Tag: Chronicles of Absurdia
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“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting John Swift’s aphorism about the Confederacy of Dunces is more than just a quote from a great 18th century essayist. It…
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We live in an era characterized by unprecedented connectivity and yet, paradoxically, also burgeoning divisiveness. This is why, for me, E.B. White’s call in his essay ‘Intimations’ to find individuals “big enough to love the whole planet” reverberates with a profound urgency. White’s words from December 1941 beckon us to envision a society nurtured by…
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Once Upon a Truth… In the beginning, there was Truth. No questions asked, carved into stone tablets and shouted from mountaintops by bearded men with suspiciously confident eyebrows. You knew where you stood. Reality was what the guy with the staff and the fire-belching bush said it was. These were the good old days, back…
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Let’s not pretend we live in a rational world. We reside, often too comfortably I might add, in a full-throttle, glitter-drenched Charlatans’ Paradise. Our modern world has become a kingdom ruled by confidence artists in limited-edition sneakers and bespoke suits, armed with buzzwords, ring lights, and disturbingly bright teeth. Our national pastime isn’t baseball anymore;…
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You and I probably each know someone in our lives that embodies the Boss Bitch. We all know one of those, a shimmering capitalist chimera who allegedly “has it all” and reminds the rest of us plebs that we, too, could rise and grind our way into the annals of hashtag empowerment. But that dream…
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“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations For years, I’ve felt that nearly every single word I utter is but a shadow of the thought I wish to convey. Indeed, human expression is often forcibly funneled into the narrow alleyways of symbols and allegory, what we colloquially…
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It was another day at the office, in the Year of Our Lord 2012, yet another one of those days where the universe seemed to conspire against me. My inbox overflowed with social media updates and inconsequential emails. The news app on my smartphone blared an endless stream of doom and gloom. As I rocked…
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The World State society presented in Brave New World might appear radically different from our own. However, there are some striking similarities, yet simultaneously it’s fascinating to see how certain things in our present culture have been totally done away with in the World State. Art, as we know it, no longer exists. However, the…
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Let’s put our futurist caps on for a moment. It’s 2035, and the New York Times Bestseller list is dominated by AI-generated novels.*War and Peace 2.0* by GPT-10 is the most talked-about book of the year, lauded for its “emotional depth” and “stunning insight into the human condition.” Meanwhile, human writers everywhere drown their sorrows…
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Today, we dive headfirst into the alluring, baffling, and often pretentious concept of aesthetics. After all, what could be more exhilarating than meticulously dissecting the very essence of beauty and taste with all the gusto of a sleep-deprived philosopher? Aesthetics are those tiny, nagging details that shape not just our tastes but our very sense…