Thursday, January 13, 2005

Requirements for Interior Expensiveness

I drafted about five different replies to your post, Maggie, since my first impulse was to launch into arias-n-diatribes about Brown, classrooms, poetics, etc. etc. But I shouldn't get distracted. The refusal to watch the news, like the refusal to vote, feels too much like aristocratic dissociation to me. And this may not be a bad thing to save one's sanity. I'm interested less in saving my sanity than in not becoming a nihilist. I feel dangerously close some days. Everybody agrees we live in dark times; nobody can tell me how to comport myself in accordance with my nature. It's all about what side I'm on -- on the matter of God and Marx most of all. But I can't even commit to vegetarianism. I'm basically an aesthete without an adequate cultural context, chafing at having brought a child into this world where the only verities are power relations and the only certainty is death. Everybody I've talked to who dismisses this has no children of their own.

[5 minutes later] Maybe I just need to get back to nature?

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