WHAT DO I KNOW : WISDOM ESSAYS

The essays in this book center around the questions of love, wisdom, and knowledge through time. What is love in the twenty-first century? Is there a wisdom to marriage? Are our bodies "naturally wise"? What is the nature of orgasm? The meaning of sex? The author uses examples from ancient authors such as Pascal, Marcus Aurelius, and Descartes to clarify the issue of the decay of wisdom and the relation of nature to science, while at the same time drawing on present-time social and cultural mores to ask the enigmatic question-Is there such a thing as "stupid wisdom"? This is not a how-to book on becoming wise, but an interrogation of human wisdom in the Anthropocene. Will the "speaking word-ape" destroy itself as well as the environment it lives in?

The Maya word for writer is ah tz'ib.

It is comforting to know that the craft has a past written in stone. As I write words on paper that are then digitized, I am confronted with the reality of impermanence. When electricity dies, my words will vanish and there will be no nuance of this ah tz'ib left. But the brethren of the rock will exist until there is no more stone.

Jack Remick - poet, novelist, essayist