Adam Robbert

A Publication Announcement: After several months of quiet work — writing, revising, and refining — I’m happy to share that I’ve just published a new essay collection titled Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures. A study of saints, mystics, monastics, and…

“There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.” — Henri Bergson

What numinous dreams, mystical experience, unparaphrasable lyric poems, a great deal of music, and the natural world all share, I believe, is resonant form.… It is the experience of resonant form that is ineffable. – Jan Zwicky, ‘What Is Ineffable?’ 208

We’re doing Kant discourse today. Transcendental philosophy in its common expressions suggests that perception is neither passive reception nor pure construction but synthesis. My wager is that this synthetic construction is what gets transformed through active practice and…

Henri Bergson’s opening line to Matter and Memory is textbook clarity: “This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory.” I don’t know for certain,…

I’m honestly open-minded and curious about using new technologies for scholarship. My only advice is don’t stray too far from this too often.

New location found — somewhere outside of La Porte, CA.

“The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power,” writes Jennifer Frey, who created a liberal arts honors college. dailynous.com/2025/07/17/adm…

Sounding is a nautical technique used for determining how deep the water is below you when you don’t know, or can’t measure, the depth with your own senses. One would drop a notched line into the water to see how far down it goes, marking the notches as you go. These days, we…

Stretching upward with a more fiery emotion toward the thing itself, we walked around…all material objects and even the sky, from which the sun and moon and stars shine over the earth. And still we climbed up inwardly… We came into our own minds and climbed up beyond them… —…