In the Wake of a Long Absence

Can it really be that I have not written anything in this space in nearly three months? The state-dependence of memory never ceases to amaze me. A return to a place from which one has been absent is also a return to the time at which one saw that place last. In an instant, three months vanish, and I find myself in the same place. But where was I on the 9th of August? My imagination fails to construct a location in time, and I realize the falsehood of my impression. It was only a brief moment of nostalgia. In a 21-year-old life, three months cannot simply be ignored.

I've read a great many things in these last three months, although there always remains an element of doubt regarding the benefit of much of that reading. I fear that most of what I imagine is the benefit of reading a difficult book is merely the aesthetic experience of reading a difficult book. Even if an essay by Benjamin seems fascinating and provocative, I find it impossible to summarize it or even comment on it articulately to a friend. What did I gain from reading it? Some secret insight to which I will only be granted access later? Perhaps I will have an idea at some point in the future, and at that moment I will suddenly understand the essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Man?" - The thought working retroactively to make my memory of Benjamin's essay far richer and more significant.

I have to admit that it's happened before. It's an experience that has made me reflect on the nature of understanding - on the difference between understanding the semantic content of the words, clauses, and sentences that one has read and the greater meaning - implicit, holistic, ghostly in the way that it exists above and between the words - the meaning that strikes one in a moment of insight, sometimes months after putting down the text. If I try to remember the content of Beyond Good and Evil, nothing comes forth from the inscrutable, formless structure of my memory. But then I read a passage in Heidegger that denies our agency in the origination of thoughts, and I immediately recall the similar idea in Nietzsche. It's a hopeful thought - and I am wont to cling to any believable hopeful thought that - that nothing is ever actually lost in our memories.

But the two preceding paragraphs were utterly tangential, and so they owe their survival only to my permissiveness towards my proclivity for digressions. I am twenty-one years old - this is a fact which my conscience will not allow me to escape during my flights into abstraction and theory. There is a temporal core to truth, say Horkheimer and Adorno, and I agree with them totally (the time for that truth has not passed). This applies not only to epochs, but to individuals as well. Everything I write and everything I think is colored by my context. Nietzsche reminds us that every work of philosophy rests upon the psychology of its writer (usually a lonely, eccentric bachelor), and that all ethical systems aim for the legitimation of the ethicist's prejudices. To recall my earlier remark, then: when we cite individuals to quote "their" ideas - despite our skepticism towards outmoded Romantic notions of genius (that is, the ability to think in a way radically different from one's cultural and chronological compatriots) - all we are doing is uniting an idea presumably created by the discourse of many people with each other (even if that discourse coalesces inside an individual's head) with the prejudices and weaknesses of an individual author (but those are also not just his own - there is a temporal core to pathology as well).

The preceding was an appallingly byzantine sentence. I apologize to anyone who tries to parse it. I experience the desire to add footnotes to this entry, which suggests that academic stylistics are taking over my informal style, which I had thought impervious to the depredations of the Modern Language Association and the like. But I'm not going to pontificate on the stiltedness of academic prose or anything of the sort. One should consider one's critiques in context. It is all-too-easy to join in with a mob venting its bile at a target far less guilty than it presently seems. As a general ethical attitude, I should, with a few necessary exceptions, avoid condemning what is already commonly condemned. - This not to be contrary, but to discourage myself from joining into those terrible feedback loops in which one feels both righteous and comfortable in attacking someone/thing from within a mob. This is why, living in the United States, I tend to argue for Russia's perspective in discussions of geopolitics. There is, of course, not a little emotional attachment to the mythical lost garden of my childhood mixed into that as well, but I think that my rationalization, however divergent from my personal realities, is a useful ethical consideration.

If philosophers can shape profound ideas out of their longings and privations, then why can't I attempt something of the same - albeit more consciously. That an idea is borne in deception, or even that it is false as regards its explicit object, is not enough to invalidate it for other applications.

I will return now to the issue of my age, if only out of formal considerations. Why is it that I continue to think, despite knowing better, that loving someone confers a debt upon that person? The answer, I think, is that this applies validly to considerations of other "positive" relationships. In committing an act of kindness (permit me to rehabilitate the word commit), one is within one's rights to expect gratitude. If I want to become friends with someone, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that person to want to become friends with me. After all, I would not choose a totally incompatible person for friendship, and most people are only happy to make another friend. Romantic feelings are obviously different. Not only are they exclusive, but they are also not unequivocally positive, although they stubbornly continue to seem that way.

Thoughts on this issue continue to follow an economic logic: if I invest energy in having "positive" feelings for λ, then shouldn't I expect something in return - the other end of the transaction? But "positive" feelings are incommensurable. Although I can expect a person to be nicer to me because I have advanced the offer of friendship, I cannot do the same following an offer of romantic attachment. In fact, I can expect to be rather rudely spurned, or ignored, or, perhaps, laughed at.

Most people are perfectly willing to be friends with their inferiors (my fellow students do not seem to fear any effect on their reputation by taking on unflattering friends - perhaps because of the meaninglessness of most friendships). A lover, however, has to be good enough. If it is the comparative insignificance of gratitude or friendliness compared to the commitment involved in even the typically abortive romantic relationship, then I have found the answer to my question, and I must admit that any fool could have told me that. Indeed, this is a perfectly adequate answer, if not a satisfying one. Loving does not entitle one to recompense, either from the object of love or from the universe as a whole. Put frankly, no one gives a fuck. Unrequited love is an absurd screaming into a vacuum.


And so we seek the consolation of philosophy.

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