Thursday, December 04, 2003
(9:03 PM) | Anonymous:
It doesn't pay to be smarter than most boys: Or I want back in the cave with the pretty pictures
Two cents to the faithful reader who can name the quotes above.
Nothing like realizing you don't belong to ruin a perfectly good night. Nothing like realizing that your very passion separates you from the majority of the world and even from those who you wish to communicate with the most. I got in a pretty heated argument over Tolkien's racist tendencies in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and while the whole thing was pretty stupid there was an underlying feeling I got from the whole thing. "You are reading too deep into a work of fantasy." That is, "You read too deeply into life."
I don't know if there is such a thing. I think it is possible to deconstruct, to psychoanalyze, to run through the rigors of the dialectic everything and we must! There is no outside interpretation and we all have our system (or unsystem if you want to pretend) of doing just that. I will even go so far as to say that all of life is translating experiences into one's way of thinking. Thinking well means realizing this and realizing that there are layers upon layers of meaning in everything that humanity has touched. That none of it is simple. We don't live in a Dick and Jane book.
I could be way off. I could be really wrong. Maybe the most intelligent thing in the world is to find some easy job, a nice place to live and a party on the weekend; just ride that wave until Judgement Day and since Judgement Day isn't likely to show up it would make a pretty good lifetime. I just can't do it though, I don't even know if I could start. It is likely my sense of responsibility that keeps me coming back to my thoughts (and thought is action) and actions (and action is thought) and critiquing them. I just can't live well if living well means thinking God is a good way to enjoy life, or "Good" and "Evil" are simple.
Why do we keep thinking though? Why did people like Plato, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Derrida, Zizek, Keen, and Kotsko keep thinking? So few listen. Fewer care. I think many people in this situation realize they are not going to change the world or save it and yet they can't just live well. Why did we learn this language of cross and Being when no one understands it? Now I can't even understand them!
Is there a translator in the house?
