Moving!

Ideally I would like to live in a big building with four wings surrounding an enclosure, with a garden and a nice fountain. Shaped like this:

My family and I would live in one wing, and in the other wings would live all our best friends.

We are not moving into that building. But we are moving into a condo in a group of buildings that looks like this:



As you can see, this group of condos is very similar to the building I would like to live in. As you can also see, there is a swimming pool, which is kind of like a very big fountain that happens not to be running. What you cannot see from this picture is that we will live here:



and that a group of some of our best friends lives here:



So that's a whole corner of my dream right there. Maybe if I dream harder it will spread until I have the whole thing.

A funny thing happened on the way to the absolute idea

If you had been at Thomas More College in Fall of 2001, you might have known me as the guy who always ran all the way from the dorms to the classroom, every morning, and not because I was late for class, nor because I wanted the exercise (it wasn't that far). I ran to the classroom because I was running away from my body. I was rushing to dive head first into "Plato's honey head," the only place in the world I cared to be, and that because it was no place.

But this particular classroom was no refuge for despisers of the body. There I was taught, if not to understand how the body is incorporated into the identity of the whole person, at least to look for that understanding. It is for this reason more than any other that I am now fascinated by the German tradition of philosophers beginning with Hegel. More than the carefully orthodox (and therefore in my view correct) but somehow unintelligible formulations of Medieval philosophers on this matter, the ways of thinking of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger seem to be affording me a way to the truth of the body. More on this later.