It is personal. That’s what an education does. It makes the world personal.
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| — | “White,” speaking, written by Cormac McCarthy, in The Sunset Limited |
There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there.
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William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, page 304 in the MMP Echoing the equally interesting, “Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who’d learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.” page 126 Train your paranoia. Gibson is the king of making the old new, revitalizing the outdated phrase, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” which a quick Google is pointing towards attribution to Joseph Heller, in…?, yeah Catch 22 which I had guessed. Anyway, very relevant stuff, for writing and I guess for religion. |
Man cannot do without feelings, but the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening. The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the scared name of love.
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| — | Milan Kundera, “Introduction to a Variation,” Jacques and his Master preface |
And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way that we reread a book or resee a film.
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Milan Kundera, Ignorance echoing (expanding on?) Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet; some Inception in there as well, especially if we consider dreams as often being past narratives (such is the case in an early scene in Ignorance or wait, I’m wrong, it’s an early scene and throughout Identity, the novel before Ignorance; this is further exemplified in multiple parts of Jacques and his Master) |
Writing is just another form of time travel.
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inspired by reading Stephen King’s On Writing and his definition of writing (“writing is telepathy”), I came to this conclusion then I read Eros, the Bittersweet; Anne Carson puts it this way: “We habitually describe time in metaphors of passage. Times passes. Time is a stream that flows past, a track that unwinds, a road down which we walk. All our events and actions and utterances are part of the passage of time. Language, especially, is embedded in this moving process and the words we speak are gone when the time is gone—“on wings” as Homer says. “Language if grasped in its true nature is constantly and at every moment transient (Humboldt 1848, 6:8). An act of speech, then, is an experience of temporal process: when you pronounce the word “transient,” the second syllable is not present until the first has ceased to be (cf. Augustine, Confessions 11.27). An act of reading and writing, on the other hand, is an experience of temporal arrest and manipulation. As writer or reader you stand on the edge of transience, and hear back from the shadows the sound of an ambiguous cough. The word “transient” stares back at you from the page, poignant as a piece of melting ice. And it does not pass away. Temporally, the word stands to you in a somewhat perverse relation, permanent and transient at once as it is. Mastery of this relation is part of the study of letters. It gives the reader or writer a taste of what it would be like to control time.” |
To die; to decide to die; that’s much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn’t death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn’t really believe in.
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Milan Kundera, Ignorance (no matter the answers, he’s asking the right questions) |
