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.