drmstream[writing]

Yes­ter­day I flew from the east coast to Los Ange­les and watched two movies that were uncanny in the sim­i­lar­ity of their view of the human con­di­tion. The moral syn­chronic­ity was more star­tling for the cul­tural chasm between the two films: the uber-Wasp cor­po­rate real­ity of the Reit­man broth­ers’ Up in the Air and the […]

Fre­quent and sub­stan­tial con­ver­sa­tions with oth­ers cre­ates a sense of well-being, accord­ing to a psy­chol­ogy study reported in Sci­ence Daily this morn­ing. Greater well-being was related to spend­ing less time alone and more time talk­ing to oth­ers: The hap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talk­ing than the unhap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants. In […]

A few weeks ago I watched a com­pelling telepic out of Brit­ian called The Occu­pa­tion. The story cen­ters on the inter­twined fates of a group of British sol­diers deployed to Iraq dur­ing the first war. That deploy­ment became the cen­trifu­gal force for per­sonal change, ruin, temp­ta­tion and despair. Grace became a com­pro­mised state of existence. […]

“You will per­ceive by the res­o­nance of the place whether the area is large or small, whether you are in the mid­dle or in a cor­ner.” Emile Jean-Jacques Rousseau What rel­e­vance does this quo­ta­tion have for the life of the soul, the long tra­verse of sen­sa­tion, expe­ri­ence and reflec­tion that makes up the total­ity of […]

Just how bound up nat­ural beauty is with art beauty is con­firmed by the expe­ri­ence of the for­mer. For it, nature is exclu­sively appear­ance, never the stuff of labor and the repro­duc­tion of life, let alone the sub-stratum of sci­ence. Like the expe­ri­ence of art, the aes­thetic expe­ri­ence is that of images. Nature, as appearing […]

“At the moment when human beings cut them­selves off from the con­scious­ness of them­selves as nature, all pur­poses for which they keep them­selves alive — social progress, the height­en­ing of mate­r­ial and intel­lec­tual forces, indeed con­scious­ness itself — becomes void, and the enthrone­ment of the means as an end, which in late cap­i­tal­ism is taking […]

I’m out in West­hamp­ton Beach for a cou­ple of days cel­e­brat­ing Tami’s birth­day. It’s a spe­cial place for us: we were mar­ried on this beach, our youngest son was born here and we’ve lived here for stretches off and on. The weather has been gor­geous, the kids are hav­ing a blast with friends and we’ve […]

Try to describe some­thing that you have wit­nessed. Sup­ply only spare details and be brief. Try to tell an expe­ri­ence that caught you in an instance, that was out­side of the nor­mal flow of a day because of some qual­ity that was espe­cially human. What does it mean, to try to call some­thing “human?” You […]

Some moments cap­ture the senses and remain imprinted in an imme­di­ate and per­ma­nent way. Mer­cer Eli­ade spoke of Sacred Time, the way that rit­ual trans­ports us from our every­day expe­ri­ence of time into a state that is con­nected to our social being. I think of these moments as being ful­crum points of our iden­tity. When […]

What if each moment you lived was imbued with a pur­pose that had such clar­ity, such con­sis­tency and such inten­sity that it fed an inner sense of well-being and self-esteem? I know that my per­sonal frame of ref­er­ence would be to doubt the valid­ity of this mean­ing, as if the only accept­able pos­ture toward life […]