There is a quiet tax now, and it does not arrive in the mail. No government votes on it. No minister announces it. No one even has the honesty to call it what it is. It is the tax on being alone.
Not solitude in the poetic sense. Not the noble retreat of monks, writers, or the occasional sane person hiding from the species. I mean ordinary modern singleness: paying … Read the rest
In the corner of the internet we built—our little ThinkMyTime bunker with its hand-rolled reflections and late-night arguments—we used to mistake the silence between posts for breathing room, used to believe that if we just sharpened the sentences and kept the nerve, the world would keep meeting us halfway; but the numbers came back like a pathology report and they weren’t subtle: the audience didn’t drift, it evaporated, as if … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
I can’t decide whether the human mind is an ingeniously crafted, highly resilient aircraft, purposeful in its mission, and headed somewhere as it navigates the turbulence of the skies – or is it (the human mind) nothing but turbulence itself – often of the open air?
Insanity is a universal and timeless issue. No culture has ever been … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Sometimes a death in the family comes like grief poured over your head, a bucketful of black water. You can drown that way. Sometimes it feels like liberation. Often, it’s more of a handshake. That’s how it was with my Dad and me.
Earlier this week, a friend told me that his mother had passed. She was 93. My friend has also been subjected … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
One of my students put this article under my nose yesterday during a class discussion. He is Swiss, and the original article was in German. So here is a translation of the gist of it:
Germany: In front of a nursing home for people with dementia in Duisburg, a fake bus stop has recently been installed. A fictitious timetable hangs on the typical bus … Read the rest
