Freedom and the Ark Work are one and the same. The only project one can be free to pursue, if one is truly free, is the Ark Work. Ark Work is what remains when all illusions have been stripped away, all false idols, all received horizons of meaning. I mean this in the most radical sense possible: family, friendship, romantic love, social esteem, power, political movements. Ark Work can’t begin until attachments to all of these are broken. When this happens, all that remains is a yearning that the world be transformed for the better. This yearning is soaked into the fabric of subjectivity; it is an artifact of the primordial capacity to hear music, which is itself the transcendental precondition of language (Jesus Christ the Word). The yearning that the world be more joyful, compassionate, sincere, just, courageous, sublime, variegated - this yearning can’t be stripped away, because it isn’t a false idol. It’s a structural feature of having a mind and participating in a world with a history. But it can be drowned out or suppressed in a thousand ways.