The Wandering Jew

No lengthy meditations tonight of the sort with which I try to reassure myself against that terrifying familiar doubt: a voice that whispers in my ear that my eyesight is too poor for gazing into the distance, my lungs too weak for the rarefied air of the heights. That voice will have plenty more time to luxuriate in its clever turns of phrase.

The life of a young son of the American bourgeoisie is an itinerant one. It is a life of endless endings. The interminable transitions from school to school and from school to that poorly rationalized farce called 'the real world' - which one accepts if one has been properly raised to hate discomfort and fear disgrace - stunt the relationships that the young person establishes with others as well as his/her ability to form, or even conceptualize those relationships in the first place. The awareness of transience underlies every new acquaintance, resulting in an aversion to the inevitable pain that accompanies separation from an object of love. The solution, of course, is not to love.

Modern life thus involves more separations than I can possibly envision in the lived experience of people in the locally-oriented, relatively static past of a few centuries ago (or in the lives of people outside the bourgeoisie).

I am about to move out of my summer accommodations and return to my parents' home. Another onerous transition; another regression into the childhood from which each modern young adult desperately seeks escape. The return home is now the failure of college education, whose principal goal is the transformation of children into adults. When I return home, I will find a fossilized version of me from four years ago still dwelling in my parents' minds. Their conceptualizations of me will guide their actions, and their actions will mold me back into that fossil. That will all end, of course, when in two months' time I will return to college (my god! for the last time!) and undergo yet another painful process of acculturation to new surroundings and to a new social role. I will become again more or less what I am now.

And then it will end, and I will say goodbye to all the people I care about, exchanging promises to see each other again - promises which tacitly admit the impossibility of carrying on any kind of organic, living relations after the separation. A few meetings to keep yet another fossil from disintegrating before we each give up the futile project and let the friendship dissolve into dust.

I arrived through random browsing at the blog of an eighteen-year-old girl whose precocious writing impressed and intrigued me. I briefly imagined an alternate life in which I had met her before I navigated away from the page, declaring to myself that I would never again encounter a trace of her existence. Technology gives us access to far too many of these impossibilities. Our digital flights end with frequent painful crashes against translucent panes on the far sides of which lie worlds that we will never inhabit, lives that we will never be able to live.

"The final reward of the dead - to die no more"
-Nietzsche, allegedly

Reflections on Nietzsche

I picked up Irvin Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept today, and have read about a third of it so far. It's a nice break from Adorno and various texts about Stalinist nationalism without being stupid. The book reminds me of Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden, although it is much more straightforward in narrative terms than the latter book, with its intertwinement of Dostoevsky in Baden and the Dostoevsky-obsessed narrator in Leningrad a hundred years later. I found the following passage striking:

And the way Nietzsche dared to say things! Imagine! To say that hope is the greatest evil! That God is dead! That truth is an error without which we cannot live! That the enemies of truth are not lies, but convictions! That the final reward of the dead is to die no more! That physicians have no right to deprive a man of his own death! Evil thoughts! He had debated Nietzsche on each. Yet it was a mock debate: deep in his heart, he knew Nietzsche was right.

And Nietzsche's freedom! What would it be like to live as he lived? No house, no obligations, no salaries to pay, no children to raise, no schedule, no role, no place in society. There was something alluring about such freedom. Why did Friedrich Nietzsche have so much of it and Josef Breuer so little? Nietzsche has simply seized his freedom. Why can't I? groaned Breuer. He lay in bed growing dizzy with such thoughts until the alarm rang at six. (Yalom, 75)

I won't bother locating it now, but there's a passage in Beyond Good and Evil about the terrible danger that faces the great man when he leaves behind the herd and the morality of the herd to create his own morality and to shape himself as he wills. No one will be there to aid him; no one will even know when some demon of conscience devours him in his isolation. That is Nietzsche's freedom. If that is something to be desired, then it is certainly not from the point of view of someone seeking escape from suffering. The best escape from suffering is death. Nietzsche is the consummate philosopher of death's opposite; that is, of life; that is, of suffering.

We have still not taken Nietzsche's insights to heart. God is not dead for the majority of the American population, even if he is crippled and emasculated, seeking refuge in the dingy corners that have not yet fallen under the scrutiny of science, its gaze "blank and pitiless as the sun." Where are the Christians who reject science instead of feebly trying to co-opt its rhetoric? Such people do exist, undoubtedly. But the religiosity of the great mass of Americans is a precarious tightrope act with only the flimsiest defenses helping them balance above the abyss.

As far as his refusal to credit the ego with the origin of thought, also in BGE, how long will it be before such an idea enters the popular discourse? Academic thought may have exploded the complacent idea of a coherent and fundamental subject decades ago, but how have those insights changed the lived experience of the vast majority of people? Fragmented though they may be, they would adamantly assert their coherence. We still acknowledge our surreptitious belief in the "Great Man" theory of history by crediting individuals with the ideas that appear in their works.

On a tangentially related note, I have always had difficulty understanding Nietzsche's condemnation of pity, despite Walter Kaufmann's qualifications, as anything except a criticism, to paraphrase Nietzsche crudely, of pity's tendency to multiply misfortune. However, Adorno and Horkheimer, as usual, offer a brilliant illumination in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Why aren't books like this required university reading? Each book of this magnitude is a new set of eyes, a towering new height from which to see ever more of the world [but a height equipped with telescopes to see new minutiae as well]!).

[Pity] confirms the rule of inhumanity by the exception it makes [. . .] The narcissistic deformations of pity, like the effusions of philanthropists and the moral complacency of the social welfare worker, are still an internalized endorsement of the difference between rich and poor. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 80-81)

It's a troubling idea - that by commiserating with the particular suffering person, we tacitly accept the normalcy of suffering. A seemingly heartless unearthing of the entwinement of reason and domination, an embittered condemnation of the entire order in which inequality and preventable suffering are facts of daily life, becomes the morally superior act.

To add yet another reference to this already excessive list, Benjamin apparently dreamt of a work consisting entirely of quotations. I think I can see the appeal of such a project: to be the unobtrusive facilitator of a conversation that overcomes all constraints of space and time to bring together the greatest minds who have expressed opinions on the subject in question. But is that all the appeal I see in this idea, or is there something more? It is a commentary that doesn't add a single word to the corpus of commentaries. There is something else there, but the insight isn't forthcoming. I guess, following Nietzsche, that its time hasn't come yet.

Introduction

Whenever I begin to write, I have to ask my own unvoiced question: why are you doing this? The world is, after all, already full of words - so many words! If anything, it would, perhaps, be better if more people refrained from expressing themselves. Perhaps there is not enough silence and unmarked paper. This isn't just because so much of what is written and said is stupid, or redundant, or pointless, but because whenever we are speaking or writing we are not listening or reading - and the world would benefit from more of each - and also because it takes a certain amount of self-importance to impose one's thoughts, feelings, and opinions upon one's audience - whether actual or only potential. What the world could certainly use is a lot more humility. It's not a respected virtue in our Western world of self-advocacy, competition, and self-love, but I think that the reorientation of perspective that humility necessarily brings - a reorientation to restraint, to self-doubt, to a certain kind of perspectivism - would promote a more humane society. All that said, I am writing - about the questionableness of writing, no less! But this is partly because I hope that what I write will be worthy of existence, and partly also because the preceding thoughts reveal something about my character: that is, a humbleness that vies for supremacy with a self-questioning but nonetheless haughty elitism, a tendency toward self-contradiction and paradox, and, of course, an inclination to digress.

The predecessors to this blog have existed both on paper and in this strange world of electrical signals. With each of them, my initial enthusiasm has degenerated as a re-assessment of the compiled writing has revealed a paucity of worthwhile thoughts and words. Nonetheless, the enthusiasm returns periodically, and I embark upon yet another of these adventures, always slightly wiser and therefore hopefully more interesting than I was at the time of the previous attempt.

All that said, I have still not satisfied myself as to the existence of this journal of sorts on the Internet. Why not write all this down in a notebook? The trouble is that clandestine writing is always permeated by the gloom of isolation. Faced with a paper journal I find myself enclosed in a dark room, which resounds with the multiplicity of my own voices. Why I find that disturbing, and why other people don't seem to, is a topic for future investigation. For now, I will only say that the possibility of sharing my private thoughts with other people is always appealing, but I want those people to be volunteers. Rather than imposing my words upon friends, I would prefer that unknown readers came of their own accord. But maybe that's rationalization. It's possible that I, as well as many writers of blogs, simply enjoy the opportunity to perform before an audience. In either case, with this post I put myself on stage.