It Goes Without Saying.

After a decade of a comfortable tenure as reader in baroque logics, Lev felt the onset of an uninspiring impasse coming on. He could sense the cold, judgemental gaze of his best work in the field of non-normal world conjuration, staring at him from the old, dust covered journal volumes, stacked neatly on the shelf near his desk.

Some say that it must have been the mixture of mundane routine and the onset of his flourishing that led him to leave the academy. Before his seven year disappearance many of his close associates reported that Lev’s long cherished, yet latent interest in eastern philosophy – Zen Buddhism in particular – took the form of an obsession. He would constantly talk of the higher jhanas, emptiness and other eastern concepts. Subsequently his interest in quietist philosophy grew. It is believed that he wrote this haiku just weeks before his now legendary departure.

a field of wheat

waving in the breeze

whispers

It is commonly agreed that he spent most of the time in India, Tibet, China and Japan. But it was the series of events which unraveled over the next seven years after his return, that made Lev one of the pivotal figures of 21^st century philosophy – in particular the establishment of the field that has become to be known as radical quietism. Although a term which Lev never himself used, the foundation of radical quietism has been unanimously attributed to him by philosophy historians.

His seminal publication in the Hush! Quarterly, is nowadays considered as the turning point in Lev’s philosophical career – this 37 blank page tour de force established him once and for all as the founding father of this new approach, or as some say – style, to philosophical inquiry. His associates and peers agreed that this indeed was the most that he didn’t say in decades. This revolutionary publication, or radical quietism manifesto as it is often referred to, received an immediate non-reply of awe and the highest acclaim from the Hush! Quarterly editors and the quietist community at large.

More papers followed. In the subsequent seven highly productive years, Lev published over thirty papers, each no less brilliant than the preceding ones; each with an equal clarity to the initial gem; each beaming with equal passion and fervor of Lev's intrepid genius. Also given that each subsequent article referenced precisely the previous ones, including page numbers, a complete body of work emerged over that decade which rightfully so is unanimously considered as the foundation and the purest source of not only radical quietism, but quietism in general.