Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.

Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.

I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.

As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.