Disagreements aside, however, Byung-Chul's argument remains a valuable one: the cultures of consumption that rule the modern world are death to the cultures of community that give life meaning.

As-Long-As-Your’re-Happy . . . Follow-Your-Heart . . . Be-True-To-Yourself . . . Believe-In-Yourself . . . Live-Your-Truth . . . Be-Your-Best-Self . . . Do-What-You-Love — the aphorisms of our day are elegant. They sound like beautiful advice. They’re certainly enticing. Who wouldn’t want to be their best self?

Seen through his most redemptive lens, Bjartur stands as a cautionary tale for those who would pursue independence as an end in itself.

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence.

Our mothers and our children will always be part of our lives, in life and death. Surprisingly, grief does not dominate our existence, it informs it.

In our daily lives, we need activities that aren’t driven by our left hemispheres. We need leisure (as understood by Josef Pieper). We need to waste time. We need to do nothing . . . a thing that rankles the left hemisphere’s productive disposition.

Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts.

Arched doorways, private courtyards, personal craftsmanship, a sense of place, and almost everything else we love about buildings has been taken away by the modernist ethos intent on depriving the public of a choice, as architects are left unchecked to focus more on how their buildings look in magazines than on how the people using them feel.

Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but especially scholars of the humanities–to think differently about their life.

What We Can Learn from a Society Where Community Still Matters