This was, he explains, his first entrance into the problems that inspired the Essay itself.
I've already mentioned the essay's combination of limited size and unlimited perspective - the microcosm/macrocosm duality that inspired William Hazlitt's essay On Great and Little Things as well as the title of my current essay collection, At Large and At Small.
This reflection, has in part, been inspired by an essay I read by GK Chesterton, the less well-known contemporary of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, entitled A Defence of Rash Vows which made me think about the promises that we make, both to ourselves and to others, and how seriously we take them.
On April 3, inspired by an essay titled "Why We Travel" by Paul Theroux, we asked readers to write us with their answers to that question.
In "Decreation," inspired by an essay by the poet Anne Carson, he meditates on the dissolution of the self through extreme states of jealousy and love, using language, movement, and video (sometimes distorted beyond recognition) as his tools.
One reader had been so inspired by the essay that he took my photograph from my Web site and posted it, along with my full résumé and the text of the essay, on his own — a conspiracy-addled "new world order" site that made the essay's contents seem tame.
More rewarding, though, were Dizzy Gillespie's "Con Alma," with a strong solo by Mr. Weiss; "Peace," a Horace Silver ballad that inspired an eloquent essay by Mr. Versace and Wayne Shorterr's "E.S.P.," which nudged Mr. Degibri onto some harmonically uncertain terrain, with intense results.
Especially when you learn that "World of Wires" was also inspired by an essay in The Philosophical Quarterly (by Nick Bostrom), titled "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" But the existential questions posed here shouldn't surprise or unduly challenge anyone who knows the movie "The Matrix," from 1999.
The piece, created in 2003, was inspired by an essay of the same name by the writer Anne Carson, in which she discusses a kind of unmaking of the personality through love in the lives of Sappho, Simone Weil and Marguerite Porete, a 14th-century mystic who was burned at the stake.
