I’ve long been moved by the brief passage in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 masterpiece “Brideshead Revisited” in which poor Sebastian, who is sliding into alcoholism, seeks common cause with his friend Charles against his family and the world that would seek to control him.
Sebastian: “Shall we get really drunk tonight?”
Charles: “It’s the one time it could do no conceivable harm.”
Sebastian: “Contra mundum?”
Charles: “Contra mundum.”
In this bittersweet context, the phrase—“against the world” in Latin–is as much a call to friendship and brotherhood as it is a declaration of resistance to social forces, however well intentioned, that would have us submit to them.
It’s in that dual spirit that I launch this website on which I will share my thinking on a variety of things that spin inside my head. Inevitably, some of the items will be inspired by the thoughts I had the good sense never to share in a commercial publication. Ideally, however, most posts will be driven by my desire to figure things out, a practice I still find makes the ways of the world seem a little less arbitrary and ridiculous. Plus it’s fun.
