Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893) is paradigmatic of the sudden piercing realization that something is askew in one’s life.  Maybe we feel like we don’t belong where we are or that the world is all wrong.  Perhaps the painting represents a visual answer to Hamlet’s famous line: “the time is out of joint” (Shakespeare). … Read more »

I’ll level with you: most of what passes for television entertainment these days, whether on traditional networks or streaming services, leaves me cold.  Formula comedy and drama that’s predictable as a bigot’s opinions, and as exciting as last night’s unemptied dishwater.  Typically, I’d rather spend time at home exploring a good book.  Or maybe better… Read more »

Ever wake up not feeling yourself? This can be a haunting reality as when a person says you’re not yourself today or that doesn’t seem like something you’d do.  To have our stable wholeness questioned can leave us feeling off kilter or even defensive.  These moments illustrate that our being (our ontology) is more fluid… Read more »

What if you awoke one day and were no longer yourself?  Floating without memory in a swamp of stimuli, you’d be disengaged from the meaning of your actions and the coherence of your identity.  Context and purpose having evaporated into a misty abyss, you might ask: What is going on? Writer’s block? A nightmare? A… Read more »

A nightmare scene: our vibrant student minds reduced to a brainless blob! Who cast this malevolent spell? Perhaps it was nefarious alchemy wrought by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who stated with slitting simplicity that, prior to language, “thought is merely a vague shapeless mass” (de Saussure in Allan, 316).  Language possesses us and subjects… Read more »