Hail the traveler. Welcome to my sanctum.
I’m Scholarch. This is where I cultivate a well-ordered mind for myself.
In the 17th century, the French polymath Blaise Pascal observed (in Fragment 139 of his Pensées) that:
All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
Roughly 1,600 years prior to that, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote (in Letter 2 of his Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium):
The first sign of a settled mind is that it can stay in one place and spend time with itself.
Both thinkers were wary of diversion, and instead advocated for a sense of being present with oneself. This personal website is a project to develop that sort of tranquility. Yes, there is irony in purporting to spend time with my own thoughts while broadcasting them via the globe’s largest communication channel, but I value learning in public. If my personal development journey provides motivation, or else offers cautionary lessons, then I double the benefit (for myself and visitors). Plus, it challenges me to look beyond dead white men as the only sources of perceiving my world, because that gets old quite quick. Lastly, writing in public is good practice for what I do elsewhere: it holds me accountable to honest ideas and writing clearly to audiences.
Notes
Remarks on the value of words based on my experiences with the Bear blogging platform.