I think I've lost touch with the deeper impulse of kindness. I'm suspicious of people, their intentions, am a bit more distant than I was 18 months ago, and maybe for good reason. The question I have to ask myself is why have I not felt people to be generous in my interpretations of people? Why have I not been more charitable? I think during the great quarantine era, certainly, I and almost everybody else simply began to lose sight of the biological humanness in ourselves and others—adopting the shrill posturing of the anonymous reply guy. A sense of intimacy and trust, inimical to human beings, which had been under assault for decades, really was killed off in a pretty deep way. It can be hard to admit that you're getting worse, to say the least. It can be a very, very dark realization: one which every part of the mind really fundamentally resists. It's easy to say, well, it's other people and other things, but really, deep down, it's you, and it's me; it’s a collective state of diminished emotional depth and mental agility…
© 2024 m
Substack is the home for great culture