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In the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, an aristocratic, worldly mode of resignation yielded to bourgeois withdrawal into the “interior” — literally, of the home and, figuratively,…

As Zadie Smith suggests in her recent essay collection Intimations (2020), the containment of pandemic quarantine revealed our need to find “something to do” — anything to pass the time.1 Driven by…

Thus the [human individual’s] existence . . . is a continual rushing of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. And if we look at it also from…

“A butterfly that lives forever, is really not a butterfly at all.”  — Data, character in Star Trek: Picard 1 Immortality is desired by many, figuratively and literally. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18…

How would you define boredom? If you are a philosopher (my condolences), you may have some convoluted answer involving words like “existential” or “ontological.” If you’re Google, you opt (unhelpfully)…

Let me be honest. I don’t want to be writing this essay; it feels like a monumental digression I can’t afford. I wish I could get out of it but,…

In early 2020, before the pandemic, an artist visited the class I had been assigned as a teaching assistant. It was around the time I was writing my dissertation prospectus,…