Subway Diary
We cannot renounce our fates anymore than we can change the past; our lives have a very deep order that exerts far more force, a far stronger force, than the weak force of our ‘intentions.’ The individual is a kind of abstraction or dream that merges from the vertical and horizontal (multidimensional) grid of social and biological forces.
It took six billion years to evolve language, but only a few thousand, beyond that point, to evolve a Shakespeare, Milton, or Joyce.
Checklist for the Millennial ‘good’ life:
- domestic relationship
- job in corporate (but like sunny good optics start up corporate)
- fitness routine
- restrictionist diet
- podcast (which you relentlessly push in a kind of weird uncomfortable way)
- therapist (who is like super cool and your friend)
- brunch reservation
- a social media “brand”
- just enough self-awareness not to be self-aware
- token liberalism
A revolution does not begin with the burning of institutions, or marches, or mob rule — a revolution begins the second that ordinary people gain the self-respect to ask for a world suitable for the growth of their souls.
There can never be universal love, just as there can never be universal war. An industrial society produces the illusion of global peace through global consumption, world wide ‘fun’ — but the real ideal lies elsewhere: in the possibility that each soul can find meaning in its striving, regardless of its scope, or its burden.
Writer’s nihilism: the belief that all writing becomes swallowed up in the banal spume of data.
