I'm feeling at cross-purposes with myself and maybe just sluggish because of the heat. I sometimes feel as if the books in my apartment are a bulwark against the hive mind, against the AI mind, against thinking in algorithmic circles.
In a religious sense, I do think we have to uproot evil thoughts as quickly as their seeds fall from above us and start to take root. I think real art, as opposed to materialistic creativity or content production, is only possible in the right soil.
Where there is discourse, that once was tradition—something that people just did, that their children did and their children after them; discourse comes in when there’s no longer any clear way to go about something.
Why do we continue to worship the idea of the novel, even though we struggle to both read and write them well? Well, it’s because there’s something appealing and consoling about the idea of synthesis, of a mind that can synthesize, and of a reading experience that’s synthetic—that allows us to experience a synthetic representation of reality that pulls together different strands of cognitive experience, verbal experience, emotion, spirituality, sexuality.
We’re all doing far more than we’re evolutionarily required to do. Some degree of emotional and psychological self-control is required to adapt to being modern, without assigned roles, without being able to follow the impulses of our species being.
Freedom was invented by the Romantics, freedom was universalized by the existentialists, and since then, linguists, philosophers, game theorists, cyberneticists, computer scientists have all debunked the concept; now we’re wanting freedom back. Now we’re wanting to be romantic again.
Epic Christian love and romantic pagan love have never really been synthesized in our collective psyche. We venerate both. We pursue both. We hope that a union or synthesis will eventually happen—magically, naturally.
The past was more beautiful but more fragile. So if you could avoid shock or tragedy, randomness and volatility, you were probably more happy than people are today. Today it’s the opposite: there’s more consistency and less shock, much less scarcity, much less beauty. And so it’s clear that the future must involve bringing together the beauty and simplicity of the past with the abundance and security of the present—with greater degrees of both.
I’m reading in my courtyard without any electronic device near me. I’m reading Henry James and I’m listening to the symphonic rushing and buzzing of all the different air conditioners above me.
The hardest part of creativity is taking pleasure in it and leaving your bourgeois concerns in another room, and going through all the contents of your memory and your sensations and symbolizing them: to go from a fallen angel of the ordinary to an angel of the imagination.
Just enter into a place where language speaks for you and you don’t have to speak anymore: that’s the goal every day…1
We are searching for harmony with symbols themselves, which is why a disruption of mental and creative processes feels so dangerous.
The primary job of a regime—whether a personal regime or a political regime—is to not become contemptible, not to become contemptibly weak. To give up your strength is to give up your nobility, and without your nobility, no one will want to keep you around.2
The problem is not tapping into finitude and the sense of finitude like an oil well and drawing a lot of energy from it.
I don’t want to pass the heat wave just inside in the air conditioning. I want to go out, I want to move, I want to synthesize the sun into vitamin D in my skin.
Exuberance is holy. But here in America we train ourselves—or we are trained from birth, both—to not show much emotion, to reduce our exuberance and our zeal and our range of personality. We live inside of a band of brittle archetypal behaviors and we act out when nobody’s looking to try to prove that we’re still fully animal-embodied, flesh and blood creatures, prove it to ourselves.
What Heidegger and Wittgenstein had in common was that they saw two highly cultured nations—Germany and Austria—and one language, German, destroy itself. They saw that language had become infected—a tool for destruction, a summoner of demons.3 So philosophy had to adapt, had to mutate. Philosophical language, I mean, had to adapt and mutate.
but distraction pulls you out of the depths of the mind and alienates you from your own most radiant potential.
And the irony—the greatest irony—of Don Quixote, by the way, is that there’s actually no better system of virtue than chivalry. It’s just that those who practiced it in Cervantes’ time were contemptible fools.
In Heidegger’s case, he even saw how he himself got the infection, at least temporarily.