Hermeticulture

I recently read Lev Grossman's novel "The Magicians," a book that's been on my reading list for quite some time.  It's an engaging story overall, but the most compelling aspect of it to me is that Grossman pulls back the fantasy curtain and creates a world in which magic does not solve the greatest problem:  that of the human condition.  Unlike the world of Harry Potter, there is no central villain to fight, no epic struggle to galvanize the protagonists and give them purpose.  In "The Magicians," the struggle is with oneself, to find meaning.  The students who come to Brakebills to study magic are brilliant, alienated, and often socially challenged.  And magic doesn't fix that.  If anything, it drives home the point all the more sharply:  no matter how much you may try to look for a change in circumstances in order to escape your ennui and give your life meaning, you cannot fix the brokenness within yourself by looking for a change in the out...

Blogging is difficult for me, especially when it comes to doing so on a regular basis.  I've generally told myself that this is simply because I am a Busy Adult With Many Important Things To Do, and at least to some extent lately this is true enough:  I've had a lot of huge things going on (all good, thankfully!) in pretty much every area of my life over the last year, and those have claimed a large degree of my time. But these are special occurrences, and the truth of the matter is that my difficulty writing is anything but.  Upon digging beneath the superficial excuses I make for myself, the reality, I find, is that my difficulty in writing largely stems from two perniciously interrelated factors:  perfectionism on the one hand, and fear of vulnerability on the other. I am an academic by training, and my first language when it comes to writing is that of the research paper.  Blogging is a rather different type of writing, but every time I begin to type a p...