The idea that all the cultural things we take for granted could be obliterated in an instant is almost impossible to conceive of. Put another way: a universe devoid of Kafka, Nietzsche and Bolaño is harder to imagine than a universe devoid of stars and black holes.
Pithiness is essential now. Any writer who demands more than a micro moment of attention is destined to be disappointed. This is not to be lamented. Compression was always the litmus test of anything worth saying.
I have veered from intense sociability to extreme hermeticism and then back again. What have I learned? Precisely nothing. And I mean that in all sincerity.
I never chimed with fellow parents of young children. I just found the whole parenting thing so performative. It seemed to me like the kids themselves were being forgotten in the clamour to tick everything off the parenting checklist. I say it seemed to me because sometimes I think maybe there was something pathological in the way I reacted to those parents, that I was just trying to rationalise why I felt so damn low. On other days, I am convinced the younger me was quite right and whilst I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am proud of him, I do rather admire his iconoclasm.
Ideas, concepts, memes, shibboleths etc need a human vector to propagate. Which is to say meat continues to be the definitive substrate for sentient intelligence. And as long as that remains the case, humans will continue to stake a claim on existence.
For the record, I think people should be legally permitted to end their lives when they choose to do so, subject to a whole raft of restrictive criteria that effectively screen for, and render illegal, all of the situations which make us squeamish.
Fiscally conservative, socially progressive. You hear this phrase all the time these days. It’s as if people are saying: yes I am greedy, but that doesn’t make me a bad person.
A priori knowledge, just like posteriori knowledge, exists only in the human mind. Knowledge, in other words, is meat-substrate dependent and for that very reason has a very precarious relationship with existence, not to mention the most tenuous claim on so-called reality.
