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@quotessentially
“Usually the creator feels only vexations. Every creation is created out of the Void. At the best, the maker finds himself confronted with a formless, meaningless, usually obstinate and stiff matter, which yields reluctantly to form. And he does not know how to begin. Every time a new thought is gendered, so often must that new thought, which for the moment seems so brilliant and fascinating, be thrown aside as worthless.”
— Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible
We measure and evaluate and judge. We distinguish and classify and categorize. We hypothesize and test and infer. By doing these things repeatedly, we construct a perfectly objective world that we can perfectly understand and perfectly control.
We use our understanding and our control to make ourselves happy. We see lack in our lives, and we focus on it like a problem to be solved. We reason that by increasing whatever is lacking, we will improve our well-being, and when nothing is lacking we will finally be happy. Then all of our desires will be satisfied, our aversions vanquished, and our beliefs confirmed.
It is this state of objective perfection that we seek. We want to be the perfect human animal, the one that has optimized its environment through control and thrives endlessly as a result. But in focusing completely on this singular goal, we miss something important. We forget to ask who it is that will thrive.
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“We’re all so small, and have such little time, unable to envision the majority of the world.”
— Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs
“The surest sign of being born with great qualities is being born without envy.”
— François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections
We call the world where our bodies exist the “real” world. This is the world of structure and society that has mostly been given to us, and which we have learned to understand in order to live productively. It is also the world where we have obligations and roles to fulfill. Often we focus so intently on this world that we cannot even begin to imagine any alternative to it.
But sometimes we also get lost in virtual worlds. We immerse ourselves in games and other media products that take us away from the ordinary and grant us an entirely different way of existing. Our desire for escape is sometimes so powerful that we become obsessed with our virtual worlds, and we start to value our existence in these worlds more than in any other.
We usually try to keep the real world separate from our virtual spaces. We do this to minimize conflicts between our flexible imaginations and the more rigid structure of reality. We give our imaginations a fenced-off space to run wild, while our bodily existence remains calm and orderly, which keeps us protected from any kind of change.
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“Whoever writes doesn’t know. Which doesn’t prevent writing from creating truth without knowing that it does so, the way we sometimes create light, groping around in the dark and finding the unhoped-for body.”
— Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
Even if I always do everything I possibly can to help others, there will still be those who won't receive the compassion they need from me. Despite continuous effort to see what I must do and then do it, my actions can still fall short. This happens because my awareness is imperfect. Where my awareness is lacking, I'm unable to see the most compassionate course of action.
Even with an unshakable devotion to seeing clearly, I still won't achieve perfect awareness. This is partly because the world around me is complex and varied, which means there are more kinds of experience than the ones I've already had or seen. It's also because there is more to myself than I can fully grasp, and uncovering all of my hidden desires, aversions, and beliefs is itself an endless task. I can try to expand my awareness by allowing my attention to be open and free to explore everything I encounter, but my progress towards perfect awareness will always be partial.
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“I’ve probably overstayed. Once you’re tenured you never leave… Meanwhile, the gap between you and your students widens. You get older, while they stay the same age, year after year. Like vampires.”
— Ling Ma, Bliss Montage
“Nietzsche in the Antichrist voiced the strongest argument not merely against theology but against metaphysics, that hope is mistaken for truth; that the impossibility of living happily, or even living at all, without the thought of an absolute, does not vouch for the legitimacy of that thought. […] But Nietzsche himself taught amor fati: ‘thou shalt love thy fate’. This, he says in the Epilogue to the Twilight of the Idols, was his innermost nature. We might well ask whether we have more reason to love what happens to us, to affirm what is because it is, than to believe true what we hope.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 61
“Everyone knows how short life is… But no one ever talks about how long it is.”
— Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
He knows he's supposed to be working on his project. He's supposed to be, but he's not. Instead he's thinking about it, about what form it might take, about how he could put it together, about the kinds of arguments he could make, about the evidence he could employ, about how he could achieve the greatest rhetorical impact.
All of this is theoretical. Not a single word has landed on the page. There is not even a page for it to land on, since he's not at his desk. Still, he's thinking about the project and he feels this should count for something. It does not. He should be writing.
He should be writing and he's not. Where does this “should” come from, he wonders. There's an expectation that he will complete something. There are people — his editor, mainly — waiting on him to produce some valuable words. But no one can force him to do it. Only he can require it of himself.
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