What is collected here comes in the imperfect tense. These essays are meditations on self, as well as historical and social commentary on the Philippines. The things and thoughts collected here are those that mattered to the author in the worlds that she has been studying, reconsidering, and losing. They are meditations on privilege, humanity, and the Philippines, and they render her positionality centrally in all such thinking.
Her critiques of the elite are issued from self-critiques. Her philosophical explorations were consciously bracketed by age. Such disparate political, personal, and philosophical explorations unite in their shared secular negotiation with morality—with the possibility of crafting it for oneself and of reforming the ones that confronted her.