Ordinariness
Aug. 18th, 2008 06:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apollianaI'm going to attempt to avoid speaking invocatively; though I don't pretend that this is about philosophy, either.
It is not just suffering to which space and time seem indifferent. Beauty, strangeness, exaltation--anything of note that is not currently being noticed by a quorum of people--blend into other qualities and sensations. These features of the world derive most of their unity from being noticed, and noticed sufficiently. There are plently of thoughts and sensations we only partly notice, or notice and then allow to fade away. It's hard to tell which will be stored in memory, or which we should focus on in order to preserve them in memory. At any given moment there are experiences we're having and possible experiences we're closing off; and we can imagine or forsee the latter in some detail.
"Perfect moments" may not be as despicable as Ronquentin in Nausea makes them out to be. They aren't less real, or less important because outside of our experience everything blends into everything else. I don't think I can make sense of the possibility of experiencing the world as uncategorized and uncategorizable--like Ronquentin's experience of the pure "being" of the tree-roots. The moment we are aware of the experience, or recall it, it has an angle and a focus.
It is not just suffering to which space and time seem indifferent. Beauty, strangeness, exaltation--anything of note that is not currently being noticed by a quorum of people--blend into other qualities and sensations. These features of the world derive most of their unity from being noticed, and noticed sufficiently. There are plently of thoughts and sensations we only partly notice, or notice and then allow to fade away. It's hard to tell which will be stored in memory, or which we should focus on in order to preserve them in memory. At any given moment there are experiences we're having and possible experiences we're closing off; and we can imagine or forsee the latter in some detail.
"Perfect moments" may not be as despicable as Ronquentin in Nausea makes them out to be. They aren't less real, or less important because outside of our experience everything blends into everything else. I don't think I can make sense of the possibility of experiencing the world as uncategorized and uncategorizable--like Ronquentin's experience of the pure "being" of the tree-roots. The moment we are aware of the experience, or recall it, it has an angle and a focus.
