I'm in Germany, technically. But not really. Really I'm pretty much on the internet, which feels kind of weird. It seems like it was only a few years ago that the interweb was used mainly for watching dancing baby or downloading Green Day albums from Napster. But now I receive almost everything I need from the mysterious world wide web: on a normal day, I conduct a fair amount of my research online, I talk to people on Skype, I waste buckets of time consuming internet idiocy, and I download and watch TV shows (there is a TV in my room that I've barely turned on). Pretty much everything I'm used to in America is available online; I remember the first time I lived abroad, and it was a completely different and much more alienating experience. But maybe that was a good thing. Because I could think, you know, the internet sure is making this living-abroad thing easier, especially as I didn't really want to do it anyway. But then the scary thing is that I live on the internet as much when I'm at home as I do here. So if I'm not in Germany when I'm in Germany, am I in America when I'm in America? Where am I? Living on the wires like Lawnmower Man, I guess.
I think that, since I spend all day reading writers from 100 years ago who were absolutely convinced that their generation was in complete spiritual collapse, I've started to feel the same way by osmosis. Two quotations that have struck me recently:
Péguy: "We are practically specimens ... We are ourselves going to be archives, archives and charts, fossils, witnesses, survivors of these historic ages. Charts that one consults. We are very badly situated. In chronology. In the succession of generations ... We are the last. Practically after-the-last."
Father Zosima (1880!): "We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people."
Also I found a funny thing in the archives: I was reading through the retreat notes from Quickborn, an important Catholic youth movement (someone had written a sort of chronicle of their trips). Mostly it says things like "heard a lecture from so and so" but then without fanfare it announces (my translation): "In the afternoon, around five, mountain sickness broke out. 86 boys and 72 girls suddenly had summer diarrhea." What do you do if 158 people all get diarrhea at once?! I think that it was divine payback for having such terrible handwriting.
I feel much solidarity with this...
ReplyDeletesick of reading mopey intellectuals!
Fujimura Misao (1903), suicide note written on a piece of bark:: "I with my meager body have tried to fathom the enormity of the universe. But what authority can we attribute to Horatio's philosophy? There is after all only one truth: That nature is beyond comprehension."
Adam, that quotation/method of delivery is both absurd and hilarious. See, it's all very different for me: everyone I read is fairly convinced that they alone can - and will - save humanity. They see all the same problems that your people see, but are pretty sure that if everyone just chatted to them about it, things would improve. That's pretty irritating too.
ReplyDeleteAlso, on the topic of academic things I'm fed up of reading, here's one: articles linking Freud and Marx (worst offenders: Gay, Fromm, and Marcuse). It's like taking a time machine back to 1952. Seriously, shut up.
Wait but aren't those (aside from Gay) the people who made this popular by writing articles about it in 1952?
ReplyDeleteYes. And I find it boring and tedious, and the rumbles of it continue to echo down through to present-day writings on the subject. But my point was more that I am currently being forced to read all this old stuff, and that's exactly what it is: old. I suppose my imperative command that people shut up about it would require a time machine to be carried out properly.
ReplyDeleteYou can't hate people from 1952. It's too easy.
ReplyDelete