In Extremis
By Jake Goldsmith
In these essays, originally written for the quarterly journal Exacting Clam, Jake Goldsmith dissects the foundations of our uneasy present with unflinching honesty and a “physiological urgency to have a say” driven by his experience of chronic life-threatening illness.
Ranging from confronting what imperils us—the fragility of liberal democracy, the decline of universities, technological triumphalism, the decay of our common language—to what may sustain us—possibility, creativity, the aphorisms of Baltasar Gracián—to even the dubious pleasures of annoyance and the tendency to judge bookshelves, Goldsmith embraces the skeptical humanisms of Raymond Aron and Montaigne in a clear-eyed if necessarily fraught engagement with the world.
These essays search for principle in an age of imposture and, rejecting easy formulas, ask what it might mean to live a considered life when body and body politic both are in a state of perpetual emergency.
Jake Goldsmith is a writer with cystic fibrosis and the founder of The Barbellion Prize, a book prize for ill and disabled authors.