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April 7 - April 14, 2021
The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things.
Those who live in abject poverty worry very little about which kind of food to eat precisely because there are no choices before them.
when we find ourself confronted with these kinds of existential choices, we feel a lack of any genuine motivation to choose one over the others.
Too often it turns out that the blustery self-confidence of such a person hides its own darker origins: it is really just arrogance combined with ambition, or worse yet a kind of self-delusion.
The genuinely confident agent does not manufacture confidence, but receives it from the circumstances.
For one finds oneself constantly craving the newest, latest post, wondering what the most recent crisis or observation or tidbit could be.
The craving for something new is constant and unceasing, and the latest post only serves to make you desire more.
The burden of choice is a peculiarly modern phenomenon.
The vision that is a “glaze of panoptic attention,” in McPhee’s delightful phrase, is precisely not the kind of awareness that the eyewitness has. It is attentive to opportunities for action, not to details of the scene.
How, given the kinds of beings that we are, is it possible to live a meaningful life?
in the Middle Ages people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God.
This order of things was not a belief that anyone argued for or a worldview that anyone proposed; it was simply taken for granted by everyone worth talking or listening to.
that one chooses one’s identity at all is inconceivable.
the character whom Dante most associates with this kind of self-directed ambition is Satan himself, who attempts to substitute his own will for God’s, and is banished to the bottom of Hell for the attempt.
The breakdown of the divine order of the Middle Ages, in other words, has opened up the possibility for genuine existential questioning.
For without God’s divine plan to ground us, on the basis of what are we to make our existential choices?
The idea that the world is as it seems to be is a very basic idea. Descartes showed, however, 350 years before Hollywood, that it is very difficult to know this basic fact without doubt.
this kind of assumption doesn’t even make sense in a world in which God is from the start understood to be the divine and benevolent architect of the universe.
What he meant by this is that we in the modern West no longer live in a culture where the basic questions of existence are already answered for us.
to be a nonbeliever was ipso facto to be evil, to have set yourself against the delights of all that is humanly worth attaining.
But insofar as a religious believer’s belief in God is consistent with the idea that there are admirable people who nevertheless do not believe, as for the most part is the case in the modern West, then religious belief cannot by itself close off existential questioning.
The idea that there is no reason to prefer any answer to any other, however, is called nihilism, and Nietzsche thought this the better description of our current condition after the death of God.
“If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”
we are more skeptical than Taylor that Judeo-Christian monotheism can be culturally satisfying in the modern age.
What we hold sacred, he seems to be saying, is the ability to footnote our commitments—to qualify them, change them, and take them back.
Our most sacred commitment, in other words, is the freedom to choose our commitments. And the freedom to unchoose them again, when that is what we choose to do.
It is—both stylistically and substantively—a detailed and deeply perceptive attempt to say what it is to be a fucking human being in America at the turn of the millennium.
our age fails to allow us to tell a coherent story about the meanings of our lives.
The central challenge of the contemporary world, Wallace seems to think, is not just that we don’t know how to live meaningful lives; it’s that we don’t even seem to be able to focus for very long on the question.
It depicts our world as devoted to the perfection of an entertainment in the face of which we will necessarily annihilate ourselves.
That is why crushing, crushing boredom is the key.
The postmodern aversion to simplicity is “one of the things that’s gutted our generation.”30
“The most obvious, important realities,” he says in the commencement speech, “are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
the harder each tried to attain his purpose, the more distant and unachievable seemed the goal.
The sole possibility for meaning, according to Wallace, is found in the strength of the individual’s will.
The “free spirit” is Nietzsche’s name for the individual who lives properly after the death of God.
It is literally true for the free spirit, as Dostoyevsky worried it would be, that since there is no God, everything is permitted.
the sacred in Wallace—insofar as he can see such a phenomenon at all—is something we impose upon experience; there is nothing given about it at all.
For Wallace anything—even some type of “consumer-hell”—can be experienced as sacred if I choose to make it so.
Is this nihilist pietism?
there is no sense whatsoever in Wallace that the “sacred” moments of existence are gifts, so there is no place for gratitude.
Nietzsche believed that the only possibility for existence was for each of us to become gods ourselves.
The person who feels homesick for land, in other words, who wishes for some stable ground to stand upon, some externally imposed constraint to guide him in his choice, this person is simply not strong enough, in Nietzsche’s view, to experience the joy of infinite freedom.
moods were public and shared, and people felt themselves swept up in a shared mood like drops of water in a hurricane.
Human beings at their best are open to being swept up and held for a while by one or another of these world-defining moods.
A god, in Homer’s terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.
In Hegel’s view, for example, the transition points in history are not chance occurrences but rational events: each movement of history is a solution to the contradictions in the period before.
In Aeschylus’s writings the gods govern what matters and determine what it makes sense to do in every situation.
What mattered most in his world was not the happy diversity of Homer’s Olympian gods, but the opposition between two total and uncompromising senses of what is right: the new Olympian gods represent one, the ancient, primitive Furies the other.
The ancient gods of the Oresteia, for instance, are presented monolithically as old hags devoted to a single way of life: they protect families and local clans and drink the blood of those who don’t carry out the
bloody revenge they demand.
