Everyone seeks their soul's good, even in seeking their body's pleasure. Hedonists hope their material enjoyment will reach inside and touch the marrow of their being. Is this not what saints are seeking, by alternate experiments? A middle-aged rich man in a red convertible, cruising the Amalfi coast with a model half his age, is merely another kind of monk, whose spiritual discipline is indulgence. Every mall is a monastery where the initiates seek beatitude, not by selling everything before they enter, but by buying everything before they leave.
Categories
- Arts (5)
- Beauty (6)
- Cities (3)
- Cosmos (3)
- Death (15)
- Emotions (6)
- God (6)
- Happiness (10)
- Heaven (2)
- History (4)
- Language (2)
- Life (9)
- Love (3)
- Missionaries (3)
- Money (4)
- Music (3)
- Nature and Science (9)
- Passions (4)
- Philosophy (6)
- Politics (6)
- Sadness (2)
- Sea (3)
- Self (3)
- Sex (5)
- Society and Culture (8)
- Time (6)
- Travel (6)
- War (3)
- Weddings (3)
- Work and Leisure (4)
- Writing (3)
- Youth and Age (9)
Titles - All
- Sea-Longing and Sea-Sickness
- The Deserted End of the Demand Curve
- A Hobby is Work for Work's Sake
- The Friendship of Missionaries
- Counterproductive Passions
- A Meaningful Career As a Professor of Meaninglessness
- The Beauty of Blemishes
- Materialism is for the Soul
- We Love Songs More in Public
- Eras Die With the Elderly
- The Mutability of Children
- A Heaven of Contradictions
- The Mark of a Moving Film
- The Famous Then Forgotten Dead
- Repression Makes Sex Interesting
- Activity and Depression
- Full Schedules Make Empty Lives
- Mozart as Elevator Music
- Free Time, Money, and Health
- The Poignancy of the Particular
- Modern Astronomy is Behind the Times
- City Rudeness
- Getting Dead and Being Dead
- The Unlegislative Branch
- Life is High-Maintenance
- War Above Water
- Travel Proves the Merits of Home
- Waking to Weather
- Originality Through Borrowing
- The Plains
- Time Passes So Quickly Because It Passes So Slowly
- The Hell of Heaven
- On Cars Stopping for Funeral Processions
- We Turn Into Trash
- Life at Sea is Spacious and Cramped
- Abstinence as Abortion
- The Potential Energy of Despair
- The Cosmos of Thought
- The Vegas of Voting Booths
- The Pursuit of Happiness
- Outliving Your Lover
- Why Youth Feels Immortal
- We Love Our Life in the Wrong Order
- Sex and Suburbia
- Missionaries and Genocide
- The Missionary's God
- The Afterlife of Organ Donors
- Evaporating the Dead
- Theology of the Empty Universe
- Music Moves the Young and Old
- Medieval Moderns
- Atheism and Computers
- Fireworks Can Convince Us of Any Cause
- Rural Density
- The Errant Power of Politicians
- The Pleasure of Talking to Oneself
- Memento Mori
- The Wilderness No Longer Feels Wild
- Luxury is Multiplying the Basics
- We Have Never Seen Our Faces
- Ignorant Authors
- We Were Gold Medalists in the Sperm Olympics
- The Rarity of Room Temperature
- We are Conquerors of Space but Captives of Time
- Modern Gold Rushes
- The Comedy of Sports
- False Apologies
- The Nouveau Pretty
- Election Campaigns, Then and Now
- Crying Ladies as Philosophers
- A Diamond is Only a Rock Without Someone to Wear It
- The Melodrama of Young Writers
- An Insect Crawling on My Book
- The Sublime and Beautiful in Yosemite Valley
- Only the Loner Can Study the Crowd
- The Paradox of Sexual Liberation
- Nazism and Me
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