We’re going to fire up SplendorQuest.com full-bore this week. For now it’s nothing, no need to link to it. But if you’ve ever done a whois on any one of our domains, you will have seen that SplendorQuest.com lives at the top of everything.
I’ve talked about Splendor a lot at BloodhoundBlog. It’s the defining metaphor of my life. I wrote my best philosophical defense of the idea, so far, in January and February of 1988, and my best ostensive definition in 1997. I’ve promised myself for two solid decades that I would get back to this idea, thinking that it was something that I would attend to in full in my retirement. Lately, that seems to me to be a less than satisfactory resolution. For one thing, this is the perfect time to talk about Splendor, just as we are about to suffer the full consequences of a hundred centuries of the worship of Squalor. And for another, I have just lately come to the realization that I will never, ever retire.
I predict that SplendorQuest.com, whatever else it might become, will be a place of manifestoes. Even so, I think I’ve already written my own SplendorQuest manifesto. There’s a lot that I’m saying in that little extract, and you could read it every day and always find something new in it. But the essence of the thing, for me, is this: “[P]art of being who I am is a conscious refusal to hide things like this just because many people don’t want to hear them. I don’t believe that I owe anything to other people, but the best gift I can offer my fellow men is not to hide who I am.” I love my life, but, much more importantly, I refuse to affect to hold my life in contempt. That’s not Splendor, not by itself, but that’s a gift I can share with my brothermen just by being alive.
What we have planned — what I have planned, at least — is simply to be alive in public as this thing that I want to become. Just to be shamelessly alive, Read more
