Jen writes: I enjoy your site, but wonder why you don't have any pics up; or even some insight to your everyday housewife occurences.  Your site, as interesting as it is, seems to favor the more simplistic, dowdy demeanor that is characteristic of men's preferences. So I wonder...are you really a "housewife" or a man? Just wondering. Laura writes: I know this website isn't hip or cutting-edge, but I don't think it's dowdy. Perhaps I should seek professional advice. As for photographs, the human face is stimulating. At least it is to me. Every face is a story. However much it may be reminiscent of other faces, every face carries the impression of one.  I doubt I will include photographs of myself or family because I rarely view a face, except in passing, without feeling distracted and intrigued. Faces are overstimulating.  Yes, I am a woman. I think I've been outrageously personal about my life in posts about dusting and cooking tarts and viewing clouds. I guess we have different standards about what is personal. I admit that some of my best friends during my years as a housewife have been men, most of them long dead. There are very few housewives where I live and most of my women friends are not housewives. More importantly, I found only men were expressing and affirming the universal truths that underlay my vocation. Men such as Tolstoy and DeFoe, Dickens and Plato seemed to approve of my femininity in a way my women friends did not. The most I could get in the way of affirmation from…

Kristor writes in response to Intellectual Revolutions:

Intellectual revolutions are almost my favorite thing. I love the feeling of things falling simultaneously apart and back together, into a better, stabler order of thought, the way that water flows back into the hole one creates with an oar, vortices upon vortices. When they say that nature hates a vacuum, what it means is that nature hates the absence of beauty. I remember many of my intellectual revolutions, better than I remember where I was when I heard Kennedy was shot. I remember understanding integral calculus deep in my heart, the tears rolling down my cheeks at the beauty of it. I remember learning why Evil is not a Problem (for Christians and Jews, that is). I remember finally “getting” Whitehead’s metaphysics. I am still working away, deep underground, at the Trinity. Dense earth indeed, that. 

(more…)

  The mind longs to roam. We try in vain to keep it running toward a fixed destination. The path across a meadow, a trail through the woods, the rocky descent down a steep ravine: these beckon and it yearns to follow. It wants to remember. To wonder. To wander.   When we speak of freedom of thought, we usually mean the freedom to think certain things, the freedom, say, to argue the claims of the weak against those of the powerful. But, there is another freedom of thought, scarce in a world of political liberties. That is the freedom to think at all. The act of reflection has lost its rightful place. The stream of consciousness is no longer a stream. No law or program, no frantic pace of living or economic imperatives stopped its flow. At bottom,  respect for ideas is not itself an idea. Nor does it spring from idea. At the crux of things intellectual is something profoundly different from idea. What is it?