In Extremis

<p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>In these essays originally written for the quarterly journal </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>Exacting Clam</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)> 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.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>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.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>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.</span></p>