I am sitting in a café in France. Around me, lively chatter. This morning I was ‘on the internet.’ How different these experiences are. Now, pears are difficult to compare with apples, and yet we often do this. Working in an office and working from home, for example, are similar; seeking community on social networks or in a café, for example; reading in the library or researching on the internet. These are apples and pears, similar and yet categorically different.…
An intense month comes to an end. Moving, physical separation, friends separating, the love of godchildren, new friendships, longings, waiting… I could write a screenplay about the past few weeks in Provence. Every day filled with pain, compassion and love—collectively in different constellations. But I do not want to tell these small stories, although Marcel Pagnol might perhaps have enjoyed them. What occupies me is the question of pain. Life is suffering, Buddhists say—to put it very briefly. Wanting and…
Cézanne drew and painted Mont St. Victoire more than eighty times. From different perspectives, admittedly, yet essentially simply the mountain. This mountain has been there for a very long time; it exists in another time. The fruit fly has one day to live, then it is all over. When we extend our temporal horizon, we think in generations. A few hundred years seems much to us; five thousand years ago our cultural history began. For a mountain, that is practically…
Many partnerships around me are undergoing a stress test at the moment. The word midlife crisis often comes up. A stupid word, I think, since it suggests that life, individual life, has a crisis. This perspective unsettles me. Why should life have a crisis? It seems rather that partnerships are being called into question. A breaking out, a drive for freedom, self-realization, wanting to make up for something. This too is a notion that unsettles. Was the past wrong? That…
In Europe, we have an idea of the Enlightenment as something in which an individual recognizes that he or she lives under constraints imposed by others. The task then is to overcome these constraints and place oneself under a greater law. A light comes on and shines into all the dark corners, to question what has not yet been reflected upon and questioned. This movement of thought is described with the metaphor of light as a torch. The light of…
