Writer's Diary
6/28/26
I realize that my life is based around being busy all the time, being around people all the time, and that consequently, thanks to this chronic over-stimulation, I’ve lost contact with parts of myself. At some point I’ve become a full-time, round-the-clock situation monitor, just in the sense of trying to follow the news, really, but New York— being a manager oof my own external circumstances (and thus increasingly indifferent to the internal circumstances).
Daniel J. Boorstin writes in his 1961 classic The Image, “While the motion picture version of a novel was not produced primarily to be reported, it did have other features of a pseudo-event. It was to the back, repeatable at will, wonderfully suited to the comfort, convenience, and indolence of the viewer, and shared the most momentous character of this pseudo-event. For most people it was actually more vivid and more impressive than the spontaneous original, which in this case was the novel itself.”
Leopardi, in the Zibaldone, talks about how languages have their own life-span, their own vitality over the centuries, becoming better and more perfect, or sad and sterile and impoverished, “reduced to such a degree of wretchedness and impotence that will no longer be adequate to use or need, and then certainly will have to ask for help from foreign languages and become completely barbarized.”