But how strange it is to forge a culture founded on the insubstantiality of culture.
In the reggae shaded "Humpty Dumpty World," God deplores the insubstantiality of his creation, with its rabble-rousing politicians and craven television commentators.
Every poem is stuffed to the line-ends with tough, spot-on imagery that makes no concession to the insubstantiality of its subject.
It is the truth not, however, an eternal, everlasting substance like the atman of the Upanishads but the truth of utter selflessness and the insubstantiality of things, of the emptiness of the ego, and of the impermanence of all things.
The insubstantiality of the film isn't due to the infinite yet flimsy malleability of C.G.I. gimmickry but, instead, to the dispersion of its drama throughout the many cinematic installations set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
There's no real concept here, nor any self-consciousness about the insubstantiality of it all – unlike, say, Widdicombe's contemporary James Acaster, who sends up his own fixation with trivia.
What was intriguing and unsettling about this unusual book were its apparent contradictions: the sensuality of its language and the insubstantiality of its temporal and spatial settings, its rhapsodic structure and style, and the coherence and unity of the theme of death that inspired it.
Every Wednesday morning, this group gathers with the monk, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, who arrives from Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskill town of Mount Tremper, to lead them in zazen, the sitting meditation that underlies a practice emphasizing emptiness, the insubstantiality of the self and the interdependence of all things.
Yet he is no Johnsonian stone-kicker; indeed, he is at pains, and great pains they are, to acknowledge the insubstantiality of a world - or "a creation", to use the term and indefinite form of the book's subtitle - which common sense insists is solid all the way down.
But it may also be taken as an ontological comment on the insubstantiality of the world around us; it is things (as opposed to our impressions of things) that are assimilated to stage-sets and the contents of dreams and fantasies.
