I haven’t written for quite a while it seems. It’s been hard to find motivation or desire to write, though things have happened and I’ve been reading good material. Perhaps blogging is transitioning into a “discipline” phase.

The story of late has been that of cruel monotonous job searching. Résumé after résumé, cover letter upon cover letter; all seemingly into the void, all futile summaries of my unwanted expertise. Our entire economic structure is built upon vocations and pastimes that have very little if any enduring significance. It exalts the meaningless bits of commodity over eternal metaphysical things. I doubt the business world holds Lewis’ maxim to heart: “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” Naturally, Kierkegaard’s understanding of the world also is blatantly ignored (and fulfilled):

By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself, forgets what his name is (in the divine understanding of it), does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.
This form of despair is hardly ever noticed in the world. Such a man, precisely by losing himself in this way, has gained perfectibility in adjusting himself to business, yea, in making a success in the world. Here there is no hindrance, no difficulty, occasioned by his self and his infinitization, he is ground smooth as a pebble, courant as a well-used coin. So far from being considered in despair, he is just what a man ought to be.

I suppose this post is turning into a bit of a textual catharsis, but what is wrong with that? The search is akin to a parasite–it consumes and infects simltaneously, though hopefully in the end it will be more affective than medieval blood-letting leeches (sometimes parasites bring a sort of paradoxical healing?). In the meantime I’ve been reading. I just finished The Four Loves and have two or three new books fighting for my eyes: The Challenge of Jesus (N.T. Wright), Orthodoxy (Chesterton), and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kundera). I plan to read all of them, it’s the just the order that is a bit up in the air (though I’m leaning toward how I listed them).

If you have job offers or reading suggestions throw in your two cents, otherwise, well, I’ll take your two cents too.