Summary

"Merry Christmas from Hegel" is a chapbook from Float that details, from the point of view of a first person speaker, her experience reading Hegel on Christmas Day during the year her brother died. The essay begins straightforwardly, with a description of the scene, time, and place: "It was the year my brother died. I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel." The sentence "about Hegel" indicates that the speaker was not reading Hegel himself, but rather some criticism on Hegel, or perhaps a biography; for context, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and an important figure of German idealism whose principal achievement is his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism. The speaker then goes on to state that she does...