Member-only story
I grow weary of experts. I check Twitter — so many experts! And so intelligent, seemingly, all of them. Such perspective! Such data gathering and analysis! So many takes. And there are so many litterateurs too — so many clever people saying clever nothings (or nothing, cleverly). It will all go away; it’s forgotten as quickly as its said — all of it: the whole Twitter-sphere. I don’t know what I’m doing there; I’ve never been there before. I was curious — hungry for information on the Plague. Sometimes I get information. I’ve bought a few stocks based on ‘new’ I’ve found. I’ve enjoyed buying stocks since the stock market half-collapsed; gambling makes me feel materially connected to the giant swings of the highly global globe. I’ve just finished a biography of Montaigne; he would have known how to pass a plague; in fact, he avoided several plagues quite nicely. I’ve been reading William James too; James might have found Twitter to be nicely pragmatist. I don’t know. It’s really almost impossible to compare the world of the past to the world of today; there was a sense coherency for about a thousand years — or at least five hundred or so; but we’re experiencing is totally new. Ironically, the world of today began around 1918: with the flu pandemic and the end of the Great War, when the old world rapidly began to disintegrate into this one. I was unhappy with the news, so I switched to Twitter; I’m unhappy with Twitter, so I slip into Montaigne’s frame of mind. But still — the hunger for the Now remains. Is it impossible to block out the world? To individualize oneself? Untether oneself from the…
