“The Contingency of Selfhood” – Richard RORTY

As I was starting to write on the topic of this chapter, I came across a poem by Philip Larkin which helped me pin down what I wanted to say. Here is the last part of it: And dace you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is as clear as a…

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“Aubade” – Philip LARKIN

Larkin began writing “Aubade” in 1974 but only finished it three years later, after the death of his mother. It was first published in the TLS in 1977. The poem opens just before daybreak to a “soundless dark” in which the speaker is kept from sleep by his existential vulnerability. Despite the promise of dawn, he senses…

“Progress, the moth-eaten musical brocade” – John GRAY

A great American poet, John Ashbery, wrote that tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted. He put his finger on our real weakness. It is not our ignorance of the future which is incurable. It is our failure to understand the present. Our view of the present time is overlaid with after-images from the recent…