Why We Are Launching Inner Life

An invitation to open conversation

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Welcome to a new Substack collaborative that we are calling Inner Life. We each began our own newsletters in isolation, but our vision is to foster more community jointly than any of us can manage to do on our own. Below, we explain what drew us together and what inner life means to us.

Mary Tabor, “Only connect …”

I titled my Substack “Only connect …”—the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s Howards End—because I’ve learned how right Martin Buber was when he said, “All real living is meeting.” I’ve met many of my subscribers and guest posters and now join my colleagues Sam Kahn and Joshua Doležal to build this Substack that we’ve titled Inner Life.

I joined with them because I’m intrigued by the probing questions on the human condition by artists of all media. I’ve learned that the questions never really seem to change although the answers do. What I’m trying to express is the extraordinary unity in man’s questionings throughout time and the unique ways in which we attempt to answer the unanswerable. Job on the ash heap cries out for a rationale for his punishment; Oedipus is caught in a world he attempts to understand and control, but is doomed inevitably powerless; Lear in his madness cries, “Is man no more than this?” It seems that the questions, the cries of anguish, in the face of the incomprehensible and inevitable, poignantly and meaningfully unite us and all epochs of time and thought. These questions represent for me an assimilation of my studies: reading, watching, listening. I hope this site will be devoted to compassion, understanding for life—and open conversation.

Joshua Doležal, “The Recovering Academic”:

I call myself a recovering academic because higher education increasingly conspires against the life of the mind. The exchange of ideas that sustained me as an undergraduate and that I thought I was claiming as a professor is often silenced by market imperatives, such as branding and recruitment, and by increasingly transactional attitudes toward education. By the time I left academe, it seemed that all I talked about with colleagues, even at conferences, was how unhappy we were or how disempowered we felt at our institutions. This was a far cry from the research questions and philosophical debates that kept me and my friends talking late into the night during graduate school. How refreshing it has been to discover writers and thinkers like Mary and Sam who seem as hungry for conversation as I am.

Inner life can be a way of conquering what Matthew Arnold sees as the modern predicament where we find ourselves “in the sea of life enisled.” Indeed, the vision for our collaborative echoes Arnold’s idea of connection in “The Buried Life,” where he captures the effect of being heard: “A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, / And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. / The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, / And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.”

Sam Kahn, “Castalia”:

I have been working on my Substack “Castalia” since the summer of 2022. This has been so rewarding in so many ways — a creative home and an opportunity to write completely freely. One thing was missing, though: collaboration. At some point, it started to feel as if a network was organically forming — of people liking and commenting on each other’s posts, joined by an unabashed passion for intellectual and literary subject matter, interested together in the infinitudes of ‘inner life.’ Joshua, Mary, and I have started this Substack as an attempt to develop a communitarian model in parallel to our own Substacks — a sort of depot where people can find each other’s work; and a forum to continue the “unending conversation.”

What’s next

Our format will be pretty simple. We plan to publish two posts per week. Each one of the three of us will be in charge for a given week. This usually means putting up one piece of our own (typically reposted from a personal Substack) and then asking another writer whom we like and respect to post a piece of theirs. We chat and are collaborative but have a very hands-off approach to what anyone else chooses to post.

The hope — for those of you who subscribe (!) — is that we can help circulate ideas and help introduce you to different writers who are worth your time and possibly your paid subscriptions. And this is meant to be communal and collaborative, so please do reach out to us with posts of your own that you think we should consider cross-posting or with recommendations of writers you think we should be reading. Our e-mail is innerlifecollaborative@gmail.com.

We invite you to join us in this continuing exploration.