The internet now plays the role of God to our Abraham: the voice that tells us to make impossible sacrifices, to demonstrate our willingness to overturn moral and natural law. Hundreds of millions are up at the mountaintop, their digital knives held to the thing they must love.
Ontological machinery only has two levers: suicide and rebirth.
I defer much of my attention for doom-scoring, for worrying, for making counterplans, for overwhelming eventualities or possibilities. The world is too much with us. I need to be less with the world and more with myself. I need to innovate in the realm of being myself.
Silence is a shock absorber, shock absorber for noise.
Without silence, you can't really have a consciousness. Only frenetic mental activity.1 Silence is a crucible of soul.
Early spring. I'm in Pennsylvania. It's easy to feel melancholy in spring. It's a reminder that the earth will continue on without you. That you're just here, an alien tourist for a short time. A few decades if you're lucky. The average American sees 74.3 springs, 74.3 Aprils and Mays.
Literature is a reflection and manifestation of how consciousness works in a given epoch. The consciousness of literary modernism was at one foot in the 19th century. Aestheticism and dandyism. And one foot in the burgeoning era of mass media, movie screens and radio. You can tell that reading and literacy were still the primary means by which people communicated.
Modernist literature enthrones subjectivity; early 20th century subjectivity was seasoned with a certain amount of electric media, but not overwhelmed by it…