For the past year or so, I have been slowly developing the idea for a new web project. My initial inspiration was indeed an explosion, a massive news and opinion site with numerous contributors, departments with their own editors, and a custom site built from scratch by a hired developer. The noise and light of this explosion incited a chaos in my mind, and it took me months of pondering and filtering, a slow journey punctuated by the staccato of inspiration that usually took me when in the euphoria of a run, or in the early buzz of a few drinks.
That explosion resulted in my finally putting pen to paper (or, keyboard to post form), and setting the concept in writing. I immediately realized I was being far too ambitious. This project must grow from the ground up, and I must build it myself.
The name Tractatus is an obvious tribute to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the earlier and far more mystical of his two primary works. The name captures my formal training in and love for Philosophy with a minor in the classics, my passion for language and special relationship with Latin, and aptly summarizes the essence of this place in its meaning, a "treatment" or "treatise".
Thus, this is the place of my dynamic treatise. Dynamic, in the obvious way that all such sites are in their ever relevant content, and also, I hope, in the sense of an evolving framework and site structure. Perhaps one day Tractatus will resemble that initial explosion of inspiration. Here you will see my musings on culture, my political polemic, my philosophical apologia, and the Evangelium, which unites it all.
I hope at least to join the ranks of men and women who stand on the front line of the army of our heritage, to add one stake angled outward towards the onslaught of well-dressed barbarians and their forked tongue rhetoric of destruction, mediocrity, and that insipid deception, "progress".
And, for all that, let's see if we can't enjoy ourselves in the process.
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