Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings.

If the world changed, would I be able to protect my family? Could I scale the fence with my little girl on my shoulders? Would I be able to keep hold of my wife’s hand as the rubber boat overturned? Our life together was fragile. One day something would break.

And I was loved, which protected me from some of the more destructive consequences of a so-called midlife crisis.

it seemed like the precise objective correlative of my emotional state, a house that I recognized from some deep and melancholy place inside myself. It was large but unremarkable, a sober construction with a sharply pitched gray-tiled roof and a pale façade pierced by rows of tall windows. Its only peculiarity was a modern annex that extended out from one side, a glass cube that seemed to function as an office.

After a moment of confusion, I realized it must be the sound of the aluminum rails and ladders of the boats as they knocked against their moorings.

Lyric poetry recounts nothing, is not confined by the succession of time, nor by the limits of place. It spreads its wings over countries and over ages. It gives duration to that sublime moment in which man raises himself above the pleasures and pains of life.”

I noted along with Adorno, that “lyric expression, having escaped from the weight of material existence, should evoke images of a life free from the coercion of reigning practices, of utility, of the relentless pressures of self-preservation.” I agreed with Hegel that “the content is not the object but the subject, the inner world, the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding to action, remains alone with itself as inwardness and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of subjective life.”

It was a piece of wishfulness, an expression of my own desire to be raised above the pleasures and pains of my life, to be free from the reigning coercions of a toddler, the relentless financial pressure of living in New York.

Somewhere in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the writer imagines himself as a peeping Tom in a darkened corridor, terrified by the sudden possibility that he’ll be caught, that The Other (that important Existential personage) will shine a flashlight on him and reveal his shame. As long as he feels he’s unobserved, his entire being is focused on what he’s doing. He is a pure consciousness, existentially free. As soon as there’s even the possibility of observation—a rustling sound, a footstep or the slight movement of a curtain—all his freedom vanishes. “Shame,” he writes, “is shame of self. It is the recognition that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object.… I am in a world which the Other has made alien to me.”

with the ripped-open smile of a nurse or a home help, someone whose personality had been formed by long hours of affective labor.

Two shifty-looking men from the IT department issued me with a keycard and a fancy biometric ID.

The border of the old summer colony was marked by a wide road, running parallel to a railway: weathered brick walls and wire fencing.

It was hard to imagine that pleasure trips could ever start from such a bleak place. The devastation of winter was absolute, as if the lake were enchanted. The ticket office was shuttered, the water half-frozen, a gray jelly lapping trash at the jetties.

When you’re going back somewhere, it is hard to think of anything but the destination. You fall out of the present, into a strange state that is a blend of anticipation and recollection, a blend of the future and the past. You see for a second time the landmarks on the route you’re retracing, and drift to thinking of the routine you’ll follow when you get back home. Onwards is always better.

into a little interstitial space on the far side of the road, a not-quite park that contained a few trees and some municipally tamed brambles.

For the first time in however many readings of the poem, I understood it, or perhaps I should say I felt it, physically experienced its meaning as a small cold pebble in my stomach. The “you” was me. Me in particular. I too would fall into silence. I would die.

I was virgin territory, an unextracted natural resource. The dinner was already intolerable, more gruesome than I’d anticipated.

I told him: lyric poetry, a textual technology for the organization of affective experience, a container in which modern selfhood had come to be formulated, and so on and so forth. I remember I said something about the tyranny of utility and something else about the relentless pressures of self-preservation.

Edgar called the waiter and had his wineglass refilled. He toasted me as he took a sip, a gesture that not only failed to be Falstaffian, but came across as actively prim.

So what if my conscious intention didn’t “cause” anything? The force, the will, came from me. I was still the one who wanted things, who thought and felt and experienced pain.

This “lyric I,” this thing I was studying with such seriousness, didn’t really exist. Whenever I tried to focus my attention on it, on myself, to experience some version of the exquisite interiority out of which the great poets had forged their art, the fullness that I ought to have found was missing. All I uncovered was confusion. There were impressions, experiences, and there seemed to be a subject attached to them, someone or something to which they were happening. But there was no unity, no proof that this “I” to whom I was so slavishly devoted, who was, now I came to think of it, more or less my employer, the one on whom my livelihood depended, was present in any meaningful way at all.

I knew the dates of Rei’s and Nina’s birthdays. Was that a sufficient foundation for a personality? I could bring my wife’s face vividly to mind. My daughter’s too. The faces might stop me floating away, but they couldn’t make me feel like a “self” with any force or power of action. How could an amorphous blob will anything into being? How could it love? I was a vapor, an incoherent jumble of events inside a sack of skin.

a slight middle-aged woman whose pinched face was half-obscured by a feathery curtain of hair. We were both alarmed. Before I came in, she’d been near the door, and as I opened it, she was forced to step back. Startled by my entry, she put up an arm as if to ward off a blow and the sleeve of her housecoat rode up to expose a wrist densely inked with tattoos.

I was entering a period when everything around me seemed to be encrusted in signs. Or more encrusted than usual.

The Workspace smelled, not overpoweringly, of cleaning products. It smelled of things that generate static electricity and things that dissipate it or prevent it building up. Carpet tiles, rubber mats. Coatings and sprays.

Not only was I being watched, I was being gamified.

I was creating a teenage midden, fouling my adult nest. It was semi-deliberate, a sort of regression. I didn’t know where I was going with it, whether I was playing at collapse or trying to induce the real thing.

Faced with the Scot’s placid authority, Edgar seemed ungainly, his mincing hand gestures the wrigglings of a beetle flipped on its back.

A deep chill slid off the water.

I don’t mean Kleist was a fake. I found nothing cynical in his writing, just panic, self-stimulation, a man desperately stabbing himself with the needle of his own personality in an attempt to get a response.

He persuades himself that angel’s wings are growing on his back. Now, O Immortality, you are all mine! But there’s a twist. Instead of a bullet, the Prince feels a victor’s laurel wreath being placed on his head, and the blindfold is taken off to reveal the face of the woman he loves.

To warm up, I bought coffee at a bakery, where the man behind the counter gave me dirty looks and pretended not to understand my German. I couldn’t tell if the problem was me or him.

All the same, it felt as if Ulrich were dropping a hint, nudging a narrative towards a particular resolution.

swinging the little MG through the front gate and scattering gravel into the flowerbeds.

Plot is the artificial reduction of life’s complexity and randomness. It is a way to give aesthetic form to reality.

I’d been watching a lot of television drama in Berlin, often several hours a day, retreating from formlessness into soothingly tight plotting.

“The whole earth,” he said, “perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar on which all living things must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without pause, until the consummation of things.” Then he went back to his grisly work.

It was the executioner’s sorrow, the disappointment of a man who has been initiated into the great mystery of human suffering, only to find that it is just a puerile joke.

This was a problem between us, Rei’s faith in the democratic process, in the Democratic Party, in the essential reasonableness of the world. To me, the presidential election later that year was only a small part of what I feared. The shift was bigger than one candidate, one country. The rising tide of gangsterism felt global. I saw nothing reasonable about what was coming. Nothing reasonable at all.

I said the rest of it silently, the things I badly wanted to tell her but couldn’t: that I was afraid and needed her help, that every day we were alive was precious and ought to be filled with love and honesty, that I was feeling very far away and the distance scared me and I was worried that if something happened I wouldn’t be able to protect her and Nina, not just because I was in Berlin and they were in New York, but because I lacked power and money, the only true protection in the world.

But twenty-three is a reasonable age to accept that the world is more complex than whatever map you’ve made of it, and systems, however metaphysical or abstract, are never innocent. They do the dirty work of knowledge, clearing the ground for action, for taking control. The truth is that the savages should always eat the anthropologist. They should murder the botanist who comes tripping through the jungle looking for the blue flower, because after him will come the geologist and the surveyor and the mining engineer and the soldiers to protect the miners as they work.

Why had I not chosen to do the things that men do? Ordering the world. Exerting my will. Instead I’d built whatever this was, this rat’s nest of paper.

a high-chair, a plastic bowl containing the butchered remains of a scrambled egg, a single snow boot improbably sitting on the table beside it. “Hello stranger. We’re getting ready for a play date.”

Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre.

Three speakers, a Knight, a Senator and a Count, debate questions of morality and politics, laying out the author’s bleak worldview—that the earth is a cesspit of corruption, and salvation can only come from abject prostration before God, and before the powerful people that God has established to rule here.

I put on my coat and hat, and went out for a walk. I wanted to avoid the Kleist grave, so I headed for the other side of the lake, past a leisure center and down a sandy path into an area of woodland. As I walked through the trees, four or five young brown-skinned men in jeans and padded jackets came towards me over the rough ground. They had the slightly mincing gait of people who aren’t dressed warmly enough for the weather, boys laughing and talking, enjoying their power to fill up a space. They passed either side of me, none of them making eye contact. Their conversation faltered, then started up again once they were at a distance.

The word mousy is overused, but there was something quick and brown and slightly verminous about her.

A gong was sounded, and from the kitchen came the chef, followed by his staff. He was a gaunt, angular man, without a trace of the stereotypical sensuality of his profession. He looked as if he subsisted on cigarettes.

The right to privacy was no more or less than the right to lie, he said. To misrepresent yourself to the world. It incubated fraud and corruption, and despite what liberals claimed it was not some sacred universal that all humans needed in order to survive. The Chinese didn’t even have the concept.

Per suggested gently that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Finlay, who should have known better, joined in, saying that there were good reasons to be skeptical about quantification, for example big data and the intrusion of the state into personal life.