In the time since I have disappeared from our television screens, I have spent more time back here in this valley, in the land of my ancestors.
An excerpt (not a summary):
Maybe I never respected the craft. There is something shallow, ultimately un-serious about it all. Journalists think events determine our world, yet events tell us nothing.
If we follow events we miss what the French call questions d’existence. We miss the meaning of it all.
My yearning has led me to physics, philosophy, theology, accumulating a library of books, completing a PhD, writing books of my own and all of it maybe amounts to less than a falling leaf.
Saint Thomas Aquinas after experiencing the presence of God late in life, said that all he had written was straw.
We do not derive the truth from knowledge or news, we feel it. We participate in God — what Aquinas called ipsum esse, the act of existence — in our repose, in the quiet, in nature and in our mortality, the finality of our existence.
No one reads yesterday’s headlines. But we return to the poets. A line of poetry is greater than a mountain of newsprint.
I guess posting here we’re mostly part of the terminally online crowd; it seems likely to be true that for this demographic if we spent 50-90% of the time we currently spend reading social media and news on instead reading books or meditating or something it would probably improve our lives (without ever interacting with the the part of the pyramid where a lot of people are struggling over more fundamental needs). Idk.
There is nothing terminal about my onlineness. It is in great shape. Could go for years and years, decades even.