A little existentialism from the New Yorker. My favorite:
Monday, 27 July, 1959: 4:10 A.M.
Lunch with Merleau-Ponty this afternoon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I was disturbed to hear that he has started a photoblog, and skeptical when he told me that although all its images are identical—a lonely kitten staring bleakly into space as rain falls pitilessly from an empty sky—he averages sixteen thousand page views per day. When I asked to see his referrer logs, he muttered evasively about having an appointment with an S.E.O. specialist and scurried away.So this is hell.
Basically me looking at Potter, back when I used to post at the Quotidian. Back when, you know, I used to post at all.
“I will start a podcast.”
Thanks Quin.
Okay, I think we can now bring this grim charade to a halt. The old blog was limping, anyway. Time to put it down. It outlived Godsbody, anyway.
Dig a hole.
Cubeland Mystic? Your turn.
As much as I love my French fellows, I think it takes someone like Nietzsche to explain why even a person who enjoys reading is filled with unbearable horror at the prospect of reading something that a trusted friend tells him he will enjoy.
Just when we were going national.
And right before you were absorbed into Patheos.
Whaa? I am so out of the loop it’s ridiculous. But, God bless you sir.
It can happen sometimes – so they say – that you develop conflicting memories: distinct recollections of incompatible events that led you to the present moment. Like, when you pull into your garage tonight, maybe you remember – clearly – having just driven home by each of three different routes. Maybe you know that, on your twenty-fourth birthday, you both did, and didn’t, have a cake – and there’s one memory where the cake is chocolate with twenty-four little candles, and one where it’s carrot with a ‘2’- and a ‘4’-shaped candle. In the really extreme cases, they say you feel like you’re channel-surfing between different versions of your life.
Now, sometimes this is all just a delusion – drugs or dementia, whatever. Whatever made people insane in the olden days, before time travel.
But sometimes, if find your mind channel-surfing, it’s because, at some point in the future, you – your future self – will get sent into the past. And if your future-self starts running amok in the past, everything he does — or did — changed the timeline that your past-self lived through. And then your past-self started making changes based on those changes. And here you are in the present, flung around like you’re locked in the trunk of a swerving car while your past and future selves fight over the steering wheel. Or like someone forced to listen as an amplifier screeches, and keeps on screeching, its own microphone feedback.
This is called being ‘out of the loop’. It is bad news.
Angelico, I’m sure that it’s only that you speak from a position of extreme youth, but when you’ve suffered more of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, you’ll realize that most of us can’t remember far enough back to being twenty-four.
How happy is the aged sage’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
He’s just trying to mix me up like Cocharan did.
If you get confused, you must recuse.
Have mercy on me. I want money.
Well at least you’re being smart about it. I went and wrote an ebook.