We are a community organized around the convictions that 1) wisdom and knowledge are foundational tools of liberation (and as such are of the utmost importance); 2) humanity in all of its inherent friction, roughness, and messiness is worth championing; and lastly, 3) the world is degrading largely due to a lack of critical thinking; the purpose of which is in no small part exacerbated by the fact that the things most worth doing and pursuing in this life are frequently the ones for which nobody is going to pay you.

So why do this?

To the question of why a group of persons, each already burdened with the usual obligations that the calendar imposes on the adult and semi-adult alike, would voluntarily consent to read difficult books, watch academically arduous films, engage with otherwise threatening media, and discuss them with friends and/or sometimes near-strangers on a recurring basis, for no remuneration whatsoever – having considered at some length the available answers, we find the most honest one is simply this: because the alternative is not nothing, but is in fact something considerably worse than nothing… and we have noticed.

The ~world~ has a preferred use for your attention. It will not always announce this preference directly, but you will find, if you examine the structure of the average weekday with any seriousness, that a great portion of what constitutes your waking life has been organized, quietly and without your formal consent, around the productivity of someone else’s holdings. This is not a conspiracy. It is a climate. And like most climates, it asks nothing of you except that you stop noticing it is there.

The EGG exists because a small number of (perhaps irresponsible) people have declined to stop noticing. It is not a protest, exactly, and not a therapy group, and not a professional network, and not a book club in the sense that implies wine and loose social obligation, though wine need not be eschewed. It is a community organized around the above convictions (held with varying degrees of comfort by its members, as one might expect)  that the things which are most worth doing are frequently the things for which nobody is going to pay you, and that the environment one actually wants to live in will not be constructed by anyone other than the people who want to live in it.

What happens within The EGG tends to migrate. The readings inform the work. The conversations restructure how one moves through a city, a gallery, an apartment, an argument, a newspaper. The people encountered here within our shell become, with some frequency, collaborators in the other projects that constitute an interesting life. Here the eggshell analogy has a few cracks in it, but we have made our peace with this porousness and in fact, we consider it to be the point.

The EGG houses several concurrent groups, each pursuing its own syllabus, each united by the same underlying terms of engagement: that dialogue is not a contest and openness is not a liability; that one cannot arrive at any real understanding of oneself and the world one finds oneself in without the genuine and sustained pressure of other people’s thinking; and that the willingness to be uncertain or to fumble publicly, in front of witnesses, and then to remain in the room, is a practically a prerequisite for learning anything of substance.

What you bring to these rooms: your art, your practice, your community work, the specific and unrepeatable texture of your attention; is not supplementary to the enterprise. It is the enterprise. We are, in the end, each other’s primary text (aww).