About my Soliloquies

Welcome to my Stories & Soliloquies, where I write about writing, philosophy, and imagination.

In my real life, I write academic papers about Plato, Augustine, myth, reason, the relationship between language and sensation, and as it happens, also about writing, stories, and imagination. In my pipe dreams, I write children’s stories and poems, and am attempting to write a middle-grade novel. My very first post here was about my desire to write stories, and this blog is a continuation of this exploration. Along the way there will be poems, images, my thoughts on story-telling and language, and a whole lot about the nature of reality.

While Stories is a fairly obvious thing to name a blog, I take the name Soliloquies from Saint Augustine’s work of the same name, in which he stages a dialogue between his Ratio, and his own self. Augustine wrote it early in his career as a Catholic thinker, and its delightfully unsettled. It is one of my favorite philosophical texts because Augustine wants so desperately to be properly rational and objective, but cannot unite himself with reason unless he leaves behind everything he loves, and by the end, nothing is resolved. The text suggests there is something impoverished about pure reason, and yet also something robust, and beyond what we can know about it. It also suggests that irrationality is a necessary part of who we are, rather than just a wellspring for madness. Its a spring board for so many wonderful explorations that follow in his own work, and through out the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

Soliloquies is a text in which questions are raised and fears are aired and nothing is decided. The term, coined by Augustine, literally means “talking to one’s self”, and with its emphasis on second person self-directedness, it’s a wonderful name for a blog, don’t you think?

Everything here is property of Michelle Joelle, unless otherwise stated, and may not be used without written permission or without credit given to this blog page. To get in touch, email SoliloquiesMJ at gmail dot com.