It seems that everyone you meet these days at parties is self-serious (median age 26), has just moved to New York in the last 18 months, and is very intent on finishing their bad novel, or more and more, their bad play.
Literature is to the 2020s what indie music was to the 2000s, bizarrely.
The essay is a fractal of the aphorism and visa versa.
Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated, — there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged, — that no honest seeking goes unrewarded. A man should prize events and possessions as the ore in which this fine mineral is found; and he can well afford to let events and possessions, and the breath of the body go, if their value has been added to him in the shape of power. If he have secured the elixir, he can spare the wide gardens from which it was distilled.
Power in the Emersonian sense is interesting to me and should be opposed to the contemporary sense of power, which connotes a tight relationship with state or corporate force. In short, the power of the individual, as a body and soul (poetry, erotics, athleticism) should be opposed to the notion of power as extension of institutional levers (existing as a spore in some collective mold growth).
Love that does not produce moral transformation is just infatuation.
The mass firing/exodus of Twitter employees lays bare the gap between programmers (makers of Twitter’s actual code) and meta-programmers (semiotic producers of Twitter’s values). What Twitter seems to have discarded are the HR managers, the value-definers, the PMC—the jurists, and executioners, of the Twitter system.
Crypto was a minting process for a new aristocracy…