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There is no understanding of the self that is not vulnerable to skepticism. The more I think about myself, my identity, my notion of the being that operates conceptually and physically in the world, has no foundations, floats, the more I realize that I am an illusion. I crumble into impulses; there is no direction that isn’t a misdirection. If I leave my computer at home, my brain pulsates with anticipation; it wants nothing more than to open the door, open the screen: take the lid off the seething pot of the Internet. How disturbing. As if my whole body was an engine for the raising of a simple, single lever. The spirit loses its way inside the maze of the machine; the myth of the labyrinth is a picture of the soul inside the brain: the Theseus within us would slay the half-human beast of the conscious, and become fully conscious, which is to say, spiritual. I’m not sure if I’m too rational or irrational; none of us are sure. Our way of life is too confusing; algorithms do so much of our thinking that we have forgotten not only how to think, but how to know we’re thinking. When I got home last night, the new Haydn record I bought was so sinuously perfect: a string quartet. The whole trajectory of the string quartet from Haydn to Brahms is one of the great traditions in the history of the arts, like the line that runs through the Italian Renaissance, or English literature from Shakespeare to Joyce. I’m tired of hiding my degree of culture when…
