Aug. 18th, 2008

apolliana: (Default)
I'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.
apolliana: (Default)
In high school I wrote a two paragraph story about a man on Capri who returned from a trip to the mainland one day and forgot his life. He could see the people he knew from a distance, and recognized them, but felt confused as to whether the life he was looking at really was his. He got back on the boat and left it behind, with only a vague feeling that he had forgotten something (which, he decided, was his cane).

Everyone in my class at the time said they could relate to this, which I thought bizarre (especially since I left the nature of his confusion ambiguous. I meant it to be more cognitive than emotional, though). At the time I wanted nothing more than to be tethered to a life of the kind from which my character became un-tethered. (I wanted to be "convicted by my history" (me, then).) I still want this, somewhat. What has changed is that I do feel inalterably connected to certain people and places and interests and activities. I do feel convicted by my history (in a good way); I cannot simply pull other concerns out of the air and substitute them in. (Perhaps I never could have done that, but youth gives one the illusion that anything's possible.) Even if I run away--get on a boat to Naples, or drive to Canada--I will always be so constituted. I am not free to walk away in the same way as my character; I am bound to things in my mind whereas he is not. That does make me feel less powerful and free, but it does not make me feel more solid. That I have attached to these things feels arbitrary; so, even if I do feel better-defined, there remains the task of giving the tethered things weight.

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