Monday, October 7, 2019

The "enormous condescension of posterity"




Once the physical pain has subsided then the lack of life adventure becomes the most self-apparent complaint I can muster. Reading about CS's trip to Paris has made me realize why I've stopped writing here the way that I used to - my life is nearly adventure-less. How many posts can I spend outlining the details of my banal love for cycling? Or, my love for banal cycling? How many candid portraits of the boy can be made? At least his maturation creates some sense of change, some vague narrative - time's passing.

I would post a Beckett quote here, as it applies, but it is too dark. I sent it to CS just now, to haunt him. He hates me. I'm sure of it. I disrupt the poetry of his sadness with bleakness. 

Those who love me the most discourage me from entertaining the imaginary darkness of writer's past. Lermontov, Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade; Fuck, even Chuck Palahniuk; Dostoyevsky, Cormac McCarthy. All of them: troublemakers and triflers. I have become afraid to mention writers that lived and worked before the 70s or 80s. Knowing anything that occurred during a morally retrograde time is a sure sign of not being wokeful. Or, not woke enough. All of human history is there only to be denounced. Now that everybody is able to abort all conversation concerning the past with a pithy observation about how wrong things were then, we are left to assume that extinguishing your memory of the past is the responsible thing to do. 

Certainly.

Well, that's another thing that I have had to let go: getting worked up at how absurd the times are. Our times. The more of a loss their grip on sensibility becomes the more we will be expected to denounce the sensible.

It never stops.

Regard all contentedness with the greatest of suspicions.

It never stops, futility.



“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” - Beckett











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