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February 4 - February 21, 2022
It’s not unlike the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God—as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with you, so it’s hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God.
The idea tha unconditional somehow makes it universally cheap
The fact that members of this evangelical branch of Protestantism refer to themselves as just ‘Christians,’ as though there were only one real kind, is usually enough to characterize them, at least as far as I was concerned.
Great critique
who often liked to treat the social room as a Christian clubhouse and have his girlfriend and all his other high-wattage Christian friends in to drink Fresca and fellowship about Campus Crusade matters or the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy, and so on and so forth, and liked to squeeze my shoes and remind me that it was called ‘the social room’ when I asked them all whether they didn’t have some frightening pamphlets to get out of there and go distribute somewhere or something.
don’t think she or the Christian did, either. It’s true that her story was stupid and dishonest, but that doesn’t mean the experience she had in the church that day didn’t happen, or that its effects on her weren’t real.
I think the truth is probably that enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing experiences are not translatable or explainable to anyone else, and this is because they really are unique and particular—though not unique in the way the Christian girl believed. This is because their power isn’t just a result of the experience itself, but also of the circumstances in which it hits you, of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who and what you are when the experience hits you.
‘To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress—this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.
Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism.’
The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all—all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.’
‘Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.’
What it means to be a hero
‘What am I, a machine?’
He shut his eyes but instead of praying for inward strength now he found he was just looking at the strange reddish dark and the little flashes and floaters in there, that got almost hypnotic when you really looked at them.
He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices.
Kierkegaard’s Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion.
This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood—that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
he has the quality of being easy or good to talk to, which is an attribute for which there is no good single word in English, which is slightly odd,
‘Well, I would say almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.’
‘Don’t you get kind of lonely?’ A small pause for this. ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘Do you think you’d know if you did?’ ‘I think I would.’
‘I think there’s a doubleness about what it is you’re asking. It’s really about comparing. I think it’s more like if I’m watching someone and paying attention to them and thinking about what they’re like, I’m not paying so much attention to myself and what I’m like. So there’s no way to compare.’
Like they’re a computer and you can’t proceed until you give the properly formatted answer.’
part of the syndrome they call some people eventually getting institutionalized is that they get put in a nut ward at a young age or a fragile time when their sense of themselves is not really very fixed or resilient, and they start acting the way they think people in nut wards are expected to act, and after a while they really are that way, and they get caught in the system, the mental-health system, and they never really get out.’
“Boo hoo, no one can love me for who I am,” so you’re also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you’re feeling it, the loneliness, so you don’t even have any sympathy for yourself. And this is what we talked about, this is what he told me about, that he knew without me telling him: how lonely I was, and how the cutting had something to do with the prettiness and feeling like I had no right to complain but still being really unhappy at the same time believing that not being pretty seemed like it would be the end of the world, I’d just be a piece of meat nobody wanted
...more
they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘You only stop if you stop. Not if you wait for somebody to explain it in some magic way that will presto change-o make you stop.’ She makes a sardonic flourish with her cigarette hand as she says presto change-o.
tête-à-têtes,
was willing to really see me
Constant bliss in every atom.
The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths.
