The Nix

by Nathan Hill

He’s one of those young professors who still dresses in such a manner that his students might regard as “hip.” Untucked shirts, blue jeans, a certain brand of fashionable sneaker. This is read by some people as proof of good taste, by others as a sign of internal weakness and insecurity and desperation. He also sometimes curses in class so he doesn’t seem old and square.

Periwinkle is like a flashlight aimed at all your shortcomings.

The mall’s overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream up your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you.

“Every sound is actually many sounds put together,” she said. “Triads and harmonics. Tones and overtones.”

When Molly Miller says ‘I’m just being real,’ what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. The only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That’s the new authenticity.

Janis Joplin tried to inspire you to be a better person. Molly Miller tells you it’s okay to be the horrible person you already are.

We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue.

It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

“Love ya” seems to be what happens to real love when its formality and dignity are amputated.

You’re like the ancient cave painter drawing 2-D animals before the invention of three-point perspective: You are incapable of working in anything but your narrow dimensions.

But such was the way with people—they loved the things that made them miserable.

What a treacherous thing a body was, how it so blatantly acted out the mind’s secrets.

“This is a show ostensibly about home improvement,” she said, “but really it’s about watching these two sweep away the ashes of their dead marriage.”

Of course, it’s not like the graffitists wrote anything important. Just their own names, over and over, bigger and louder and more colorful. Which come to think of it was the same strategy used by fast-food chains on billboards across the country. It was just self-promotion.

Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

Bingo

She is a body perceiving the world, and all her senses are filled.

“That advertisement tells you everything you need to know about twenty-first-century America.”

“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”