Taking off the Mask: Essays Volume I

The Blog of Innocence was started in 2008 with the motivating desire to write essays and meditations on a broad spectrum of topics that intimately concerned me. The title of “Innocence” is a partial response to Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Whereas Pessoa’s writings center on an imaginative cynicism, I sought to create essays that would appeal to just the opposite.

The sense I wanted to convey about myself and the world was a simple questioning and naivety toward material reality and experience. I don’t go in for any postmodern tricks here, but rather I seek to return to a state where cleverness and sophistication are alien and not very useful to understanding ourselves. I want to experience not knowing, so I can further discover something.

You will see many references to The Blog of Innocence in these essays; this is because the essays were originally posted on my blog. There will be four volumes of essays available as eBooks, each covering a different subject area. This first volume, entitled Taking off the Mask, concerns life and culture. The next volume will be concerned with art. The volume after that will be concerned with technology and the web. And the last volume will be concerned with literature and writing.

My sincerest wish is that you take something from these words of mine. Writing is the closest thing to my heart. It is the way I commune with others, and myself.

Taking Off the Mask: Essays Volume I