Greetings friends. I am reconciled with my wife, moved back home, and love her more than my own life. I’ve been doing well at my job – it was iffy for a while! – and over all life is beautiful once again. I’ve been working on this essay intently for a week, and can no longer stand to look at it. The theme is that we must read life and realize that style resonance is the basis of finding our place in the world. As usually, my ideas are all over the place – this is the allistic style – but I try to subordinate them to the key them. I will return to this essay in four months for the next draft, so your feedback is helpful
Take care, Caretakers!
Daniel Christopher June
To Fall in Love is to Resonate to a Style
I cannot engage an author whose style and tone do not resonate with me. An author who is my own I recognize immediately – the same with people. Nietzsche I can read forever, always gaining more, feeding on him as if it were leaves fallen from my own limbs. Emerson and Whitman are the same. Deleuze I could not get three feet into without feeling sick. The style interrupts itself nonstop, in the French postmodern style, so thick and congested with allusions and quotations that within seconds my head is spinning and ears clamoring. I can’t read a sentence of William Gass without disgust. Yet anything written in the American Renaissance breathes well with me. Its all in the touch of the clause, the assonance of vowels, and the smile on the author’s face. A style shows me my own. The soul beneath the words chose them and gives them to me like a Valentine.
Style is emanation of the innermost. Those born from the same spark as us resonate to us, style to style. Every man is like a god, each who has some bird, plant, or animal sacred to him – “the eagle, which is sacred to Zeus” – so that we find from our innermost name the corresponding analogies in nature. The unique shape of our soul requires an external system to fully express and fulfill it: we seek a circle of friends, but a circle of a certain shape and orbit, perhaps bent a little this way, perhaps bent a little that. The soul finds its shape scattered here and there throughout history, as if a trickster god had reached into his heart at the beginning of time, and scattered diamonds of his soul throughout the mix of things. Sometimes, it takes decades to fall in love, to let an idea sink deep into the soul and permeate the soul. The soul must want it deep down. Then the tempo is within our heart. We can only fall in love with our own. The strange becomes beauty, once we know how to see.
Style is easiest to see within an epitome. We all come to epitomize our soul first of all in some symbol, some gesture, some mannerism or nickname, to stand for the general tendency, and second of all, in some crowning story, which evokes and overcomes that general tendency. “Every dog has its day.” We each shine best through some event we couldn’t predict, which retroactively defines us. The tiny circle of the soul, if blown as wide as the solar system, would show a thread as nuanced as a key, and thickly rich. We can best fulfill our nuanced need when our desires are intellectualized, exploded, and personally touched. There is the stereotypical me, the abbreviated, easily mocked, easily gossiped, easily exchanged type of me, that is currency among friends and acquaintances – and here a nickname will do. And then there is the apotheosis of me, as I engage that nickname, both justifying and overcoming it, my self-overcoming. In other words, there is Daniel normal and Daniel exceptional, and both refer back to the self-same inner being. Only a best friend would have the fine taste to know my subtleties; for the rest, knowing these two will do.
An epitome is like a character sketch: confusing data is graphically simplified. Likewise, the language of science is math, logic, geometry. Any set of data can be graphed in a coherent manner. Chaos theory is based on simplifying data sets: there never was any chaos to begin with. Let the universe speak in my language, and I will listen. Speak to my needs, and you interest me. The epitome graphs my complexity into the perfect gesture.
Our epitome is present in every breath. Style is a matter of breath. The mind breaths. The focus of I breathes in sentences; each sentence or fragment of thought resembles wind floating images; each is syntactically chopped into breaths. We can only think for so long before we must stop and breath. And we can only stay on one topic before we can’t learn any more. You cannot study chemistry dawn to dusk, for the topic will exhaust our interest. Interest is like a field of fluid, like a glimmering fog of white, that doubles what we focus upon; when it is gone, we lack the energy to handle such things. Every friendship needs a vacation; every object needs a break. We think together if we breath together. As thought is deeper than talk, it takes longer to think with a friend than it does to talk with him.
The breath of focus is our style of thinking. It is the music of thought. Music itself is the objectified form of emotion, and our emotions structure themselves like a kind of symphony. The breath of focus is our fundamental style; it metaphorically embodies our values, those ordered feelings of importance, so that when we hear a person talk, we immediately know if he is of our own. When we read a writing, the words brush by like air, but slowly they get the water moving. Every word has emotional resonance, and slowly we are feeling the tone and attitude of the author. This attitude presents his ultimate values; if they resonate to ours, we will love him; if they don’t, we won’t. We can tell merely by how long his clauses are, by how he stacks them – how many, and in what order, with what contrast – we can sense his soul, for every part of him exudes the shape of the whole. Attitude is a filter. The world is too thick: we must use our attitude as a sort of engine of thought that only allows certain objects to become conscious.
The world intensifies to our appraisal. Our friends slowly confirm our suspicions, they become more and more stereotyped, until we have divine a secret habit of their thinking; then they are caught. We can now bring that person to his crisis, by confronting him with his own automatic habit, his nickname, his casual gesture, and forcing his mind to react to it. If my friend habitually lies regarding her past, I can confront her with that past. Like wind over water, I pull from the lake a river, I open a path to the sea. I know her heart by how she talks, but her mind by her eyes.
Intelligence resides only in mental endurance. How long can an intense focus last? Sometimes I can say the right words to the right person and I see her life forever changed. So much preparation went into those words: my whole life went into them. I fed her my soul. It takes decades to understand a simple idea, and though I might hear a cliché a thousand times, a proverb becomes providential when it dawns personally on me. Pain requires much interpretation to symbolize. We can cope with any problem once we have appreciated its parameters, are no longer surprised by it, know what to expect, and can thus abbreviate it into a rational story. It must fit our life story, be part of it, feed the same river, the same great Uroborus.
Pain invades us; trauma forces energy into deep layers. This must be processed. We can only formulate what we can control. And once it can be said, it can be done, overcome, handled, defeated. Energy from our needs emerges within different layers. When the time is ripe, that energy emerges and demands full focus. We can only focus for a while, the god is on for a bit, intensity times duration, before we must rest again and turn our energy to another organ. Only what I haven’t done in months can I do with enthusiasm. This is why all great artists are continually creating, working on many things at once, many related projects, capturing every tone and mode of inspiration. And yet I must relax from my art and fall into the arms of love.
The deep layers require personal touch. We need intimacy, as we need love. Love is the pleasure of intimacy. The inner spheres of our heart must be touched to release and receive energy. Lacking an ability to touch heart to heart, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth, genital to genital, hope to hope – always like to like – we would resort to trauma to get our intimate needs touched. Would we have criminals if they knew how to lover?
We do what we care about. Caring is enjoying intimacy, to focus on and personally touch. Will against will is the nature of competition, and so fighters and warriors are intimate. Care is about emotional investment. Philosophers must humbly give their philosophy to philosophers, and speak in riddles to the rest: a great poet writes only for poets, and leaves the hacks to write for the masses. Narcissus could not be tricked by an audio reflection, he wanted eye for eye and gaze for gaze.
When the inner layers swell with energy and wish to express themselves, we unconsciously arrange an intimate encounter, we prepare to engage a touch. This is falling in love, or dallying a flirtation, or initiating a friendship, or discovering a new favorite author, or playing a new fad, or whatever else.
Ultimately, when we need intimacy, we speak intimately. Words convey emotions, and we internalize and externalize emotions all the time, as the social energy, the stuff of life. It is as if reveres of different colors poured out from us and into others. For every person in our life, we pour some emotion, if not through our words to him. at least into our image of him, which finds voice whenever we talk about that person. Every word others say has an emotional resonance, which means something personal to us. Strong styles influence us. If one coworker is insistent upon exactitude at work, everybody else starts paying attention to the rules, at first ironically, then naturally.
We are each to the world a style incarnate. Style is personal, it is the personality made tangible. The personality is the sum of our communication habits, just as our reason is the sum of our thinking habits, our attitude the sum of our feeling habits, and our character the sum of our acting habits. Since attitude is a filter, we each do not see the world as others do. Our memories are formed from mental snapshots, some of them invented after the fact, as many people remember their childhood in the third person, watching themselves as if in a movie. Our mental snapshots represent the world to us, and thus we make reality by how we structure our memories. There is style in how we remember.
There are two extremes in the way we talk: A good literary style is either toothy or tonguey. A tooth style chops ideas finely, and says things not beautifully but exactly. A legal contract is toothy. A poem speaks with the tongue: any word can be used to talk about my desire, so long as it sounds beautiful where I place it. The tongue is the organ of desire, of consumption and expression. The tongue is a fire, and language is lust. We speak in order to make others desire what we desire.
Eating the styles of the world requires both tooth and tongue. Fine taste is knowing the words and terms necessary to appreciate small distinctions, having teeth. Perception requires conceptualization to capture nuance. We could listen to Beethoven all year, but not knowing the specific musical terms, we would fail to speak meaningfully of the patterns in his symphonies. Having the terms, we can listen to the music and get much more out of it. Knowing the systems and terms, we build expectations of the genre, and are able to set Beethoven within it. We come to see that each of his symphonies is a being in itself, that his complete work is a being in itself, that the world of his contemporaries is a being in itself, the complete genre of music is a being in itself – and all these compound as the spheres of being, as layers of consciousness. It takes good taste to see something in terms both of its own being and also its context. Good taste is also within its own context, since the taste still belongs to a being with needs, living within history. This is how it should be, because this is how it must be.
Good taste means being harder to impress, but when impressed, experiencing greater pleasure. Each of us is hyper-sensitive to only a few things. And what we taste with greatest nuance, there we are both picky and open to ecstasy.
To build good taste, to build a personal style which acquires taste in order to sustain itself – and feeding our own creative expression is the best justification for enjoying art in the first place – it requires a continual expenditure. Good taste consumes much energy. Time is limited. There are only so many hours in the day. I could exercise, I could cook, I could read all sorts of books, learn all sorts of instruments, volunteer my time, go to church, attend symphonies, see concerts – there is no end to what I could to, and its all nonsense. What I must do matters. What I must do I do because I have certain needs, and those needs require expression.
Bursts of energy come to the surface of consciousness unexpectedly: I never know where I will find inspiration. I suddenly find myself eating this food, befriending that person, reading such and such a book, and I attack these things with such passion that each of them feels most necessary, feels as if for the moment, this man, this book, this drink is the full world, and my sacred duty is only to fully indulge this one thing. That is the secret of my genius. To love one thing with my full strength when I am ripe for love: of that I am never ashamed. My projects come to me with a certain unpredictable fascination. They silence all other interests, and I enjoy them with the full tenor of my passion. My entire style of energy is passionate. My energy builds like sex, bursts like an orgasm, and rests like success.
Style is based on breath and circulation – tempo. Our style is more in what we do than in what we wish we did. Philosophizing requires an excessive mental energy, which would otherwise be spent in business and love. Let a friend complain that he wishes he had more time to learn the guitar. I wonder if he means it. He may plan on starting lessons as soon as he gets his promotion. Yet whether he gets it or not, I think he won’t start the lessons. We each make time for what is important to us. If we want to do something, we would do it. And the karma of our desire is that we always get what we want. Whatever we think we want, our actions show what we really want, and we never fail to get it.
To use the old distinction, not quite coherent, not quite convincing, between drive and desire, a drive is the expression of life—what we need; and desire the basis for mind –what we want. My drives are like Uroburos, the tail biting serpent, the river that comes full circle. My beginning and end are in writing. I write better to improve my life, and live a better life to improve my writing. As cycling productivity is a central virtue to me, I find it necessary to ever return over the same old ground, to cycle through my documents, through my writing, through my possessions, editing them constantly. What clothes don’t I need to own, what books, what letters? I seek to carve away all distractions, all clutter. A great circular river runs through my life, and will continue to cut into history long after I die. For it lives within my writing, and my writing is my immortality in this world. The key to life, the purpose of life, the meaning of life, is to create the perpetual goal, the Uroborus, the continually intensifying drive of constant engagement. Writing this book is my Uroborus. I spend decades on it, I am never finished.
How long can an intense focus last? As meaningfulness is a slowed down and pronounced breath of focus, so the most meaningful moments come from intense focus. This cannot be sustained. And even when it can be prolonged, it can’t be on the same object. William James said we could only focus for a matter of seconds on one thing, and this is true even for adept meditators. The brain consumes most of our blood, the mind consumes most of our energy. Yet it is lazy and wants vacations. All friendship wants spaces and vacations, even marriages wants token departures and fake divorces, to maintain and sustain the intimacy. Intimacy is the shortest touch, and yet it is worth all the coldness and distance, and even requires much coldness and distance.
Intimacy requires engagement. Engagement is a mirroring of language, a coupling of attitudes, a doubling of beliefs – “what I assume you shall assume!” We can only engage our lover for a moment, and must turn away again lest our heart cover itself in shame from too much touch.
Every relationship requires more than love of style. Love is never enough. If love is the core of our marriage, the skin and muscle of it must be the contractual aspect of two people sharing responsibilities, filling traditional roles, divvying up chores, working together, talking constantly. Commitment is the ripeness of romance. To commit to a lover, to solidify the emotional intimacy with the intractable promise of duty, requires a mature self-respect, as one capable and willing to hold to a promise,; as one, therefore, who deserves love in the first place. It isn’t even love until it is more than love. Yet as sharing a secret initiates the friendship, as sharing a guilt inaugurates the love, as sharing a privacy is the basis of all deep relationships, the duty is hollow without the internal core of love. Duty protects the heart. Intimacy is all important, and yet intermittent. The shared shame of lovers is their greatest pride –shame is the cloak of pride! – for lovers boast endlessly of their love, and protect it jealously, ruthlessly, and immorally, as they should. The primacy of the we-form, of “us the couple,” this is the breathing of a shared style, a new being, a group identity. Style is a manner of breathing. Lovers breathe together, conspire together, they are ever enemies of the public, and thus the public needs them.
Intimacy requires engagement, conversation. Almost all conversation, no matter how practical, is really about establishing attitudes. Each tone of voice resonates to some inner layer of my heart, so that intimacy is possible only if you can speak it, if you can sustain that tone when my defenses go up. Nothing can approach me which is not already part of me. Do you speak to me of God or the All? Well I adore the All. Yet the worldview of the all is merely one more view among many. So she is omniscient, what is that to me? I see things as I need to see them, as I choose to see them, and that is good for me. Wondering what Eternity thinks would be pure projection on my part. Even if she told me herself, I would be under no compulsion to concur, because I am my own universe.
We each need a metaphysical myth about our place in the universe. A fantasy is a story the needs tell us. It represents both what we want, and what we think others want of us: it aims to unify us with the whole. Fantasies are social, not selfish. Possibilities make for the hottest fantasies. If I never intended to date let alone meet my favorite female singer, I am still a little sad when she marries, as if a door had closed for me. Fantasy and art serve similar functions, for beauty is the symbol of value, is the pleasing face we put over the pleasing thing. All gaps and inconsistencies in the world are really in our way of looking at the world, science and intelligence is never complete. The mind alone has gaps; the mind alone needs fill them: and for this we need art. Fantasy ensures that the emotions circulate.
Friendship means mirroring the best in those we love. It requires great sympathy to know how to mirror a man’s soul back to him. Polite gestures are one thing, and we can all talk about the weather. But to know his soul intuitively, to say the very same words to this man as we did with that one, and yet with this one, with our tones, pauses, and gestures, reflecting his soul back on itself, so he becomes more himself, so he reveals his intimate parts, so his internal circle expands to make his nuances tangible, this requires mental acumen. Behind all sanity, each man is mad; behind his normalcy, he is peculiar. We structure our madness to fit in with the everyday. We want to be paid for our abnormalities. When we sniff each other out, to our own we say “no one had to tell us these truths. Twenty years of sitting tried to take them from us. The innocence I keep protected in my madness resonates when you are near, as if I remember a far away perfection. Who are you? Perhaps a bit of song reminds me the same. I call you elusive. Only in the innocence of sickness am I able to be fully honest to you for then I lack all shame. Was not the shame of nakedness called evil?”
We are friends and mirror beauty to beauty. How do we mirror the innermost? The unconscious mirrors what you hope to find in it. If chakras, then chakras, if Atman, then atman, if Id, then Id. It is a clever demon, taking the shape of what we expect. It knows how to make us believe that this strange thing is normal and to be expected. Consider our dreams. We don’t feel surprised, no matter how bizarre they are, but marvel only in the morning when we grope to remember them.
Perhaps the essence of my strangeness will be one day distilled. I seek to say amidst these thousands of pages only a few of the ever same things. Perhaps each man should be viewed by his mythic fantasy. Mine is to deify myself, and leave this scripture for my lovers, who are of my same soul. This book is my body. We each have a key fantasy. Zizek identifies the Lacanian analyst’s fantasy – and Zizek’s as well – to show how “the undeniable fact that a person is in love can be denied and taken from him through analysis,” the desire to eat the patient’s desain, his soul, by unearthing his core fantasy. No psychoanalyst can do this, but that doesn’t matter, because Zizek wants it. Fantasized that he had decentered man the way Copernicus and Darwin had, and Derrida voyeuristically imitated him and wanted to do this, by decentereing centeredness itself. They all failed in this, yet what matters about them is that they wanted to do it, just as the crazy youth who boils his blood as a sacrifice to some demon is indeed dangerous and untrustworthy, though demons don’t really exist.
Our fantasy is an invisible anchor and support for our context. Democracy requires a unique fantasy, as is exemplified in Thoreau, who enacts the democratic desire. Thoreau’s basic trope in his prose is to mock those who think conventionally. He mocks the farmer who scoffs at vegetarians for lacking meat in their diet to build their bones, while his grass-fed oxen at the same time pull his plow and break the ground. His basic trope, shows the average man stupid. Is he quite an American, having this contempt for the masses? Yes, in a democracy, most men must think themselves better than average, while yet affirming the democratic rights of the average. Thoreau lived the philosopher’s life, the same as Diogenes – own as little as possible. The religion of Christians was to look forward to the future possessions in heaven where “there are many mansions awaiting.” Thoreau did not wish to live the simple life in order to earn the right to more possessions. He was Greek, and not resentful Christian. He wanted to be different now, a sort of God on earth
The democratic problem is how to objectify the people. You cannot walk through a crowd of individuals. To walk comfortably through a crowd, you must abbreviate people into objects, and not even look at them. They become the same as rocks and trees, and if they push into you, push back into them with a compulsory “excuse me,” and no further reception of them as persons. Whitman would look on each man and woman as an individual, and lusted for each accordingly – for to take a person intimately means to love him – and so his manner of incorporating the masses was to catalog them non-hierarchically. Thoreau and Whitman are opposite ends of the democratic fantasy. How do they combine?
It is the power-fantasy of every democracy to be popular enough to sway the masses; rather than the dream of being a tyrant or monarch, one wishes to be a celebrity, a rock star, a movie personality. Nobody quite wishes to be president. Just as every Absolute survives by allowing exceptions, so all things survive through a tinge of hypocrisy, a conversation between being and seeming. Whitman wished to greet every fruit-peddler as his equal, and yet called himself a “Kosmos.” The American fantasy is summed up in the phrase “all men are created equal,” which implies that to be more than equal, you must be the creator. It is right that our religion of Mormonism differs from the other Abrahamic religions in identifying God as an advanced man and man as an infant God, with Adam as God of this Earth. The democratic principle, which unifies the nation into one mind, also intensifies the political importance of the individual, who amounts to so little, and therefore requires the balance of spiritual transcendency. The spiritual ambitions of Emerson and Whitman exemplify how a person must believe if he idealizes democracy.
Myths place us in the universe and reconcile us to our world. We each need a myth that tells our own origins and how we escaped them. The myth of origins is the basic motif of fairy tales: who are my real parents? Peasants, or royalty? How do we transcend our context? Superman the comic book hero became great by escaping his context. Born on a foreign planet, he was stronger under our sun. So must we all. What we are born into, the difficulties of our childhood, our family, or situation, give us great strengths which, when applied to adult life, make all the difference. Odin, when he was imagined to be a king, was a travelling king, and came from the East to settle in Europe. This Norse God was great because he escaped from his origins.
To escape our context, to flee the womb, is the heroic gesture. It might rightly be said that boredom and the desire to avoid it are the pivotal drives of the human race. Its not just that we talk, but that we want something to talk about. Our instincts, like Odin or Superman, have escaped their original context, and so they are no longer natural, they are supernatural. It is the same the way we read the Iliad, though none of us worships Zeus, for this literature has universal appeal even though we may yet find the myth silly. A book is world literature when it needs no context, but adapts to every context. And so we would rightly call the supernatural that which exceeds its original nature: the man at his apotheosis, when man becomes God.
Each citizen in a democracy must also be a god, to balance the whole against his own thing. Each of us must have a thing. When we say of our neighbor “his thing is tennis,” or “chess is his thing,” what is this thing? It is the activity that makes us feel most alive, though philosophically minded, philosophy pure isn’t my thing. Writing is. This processing of experience into crystallized words becomes my defining gesture. We each have such signature gestures, we each have our element, our place, our medium. For that thing, we can focus at long intervals. Focusing is like muscle tension, which can only last a moment, yet we can repeat it again and again, for hours and hours. For us it is easy, as hard work is easy, and we cannot resist it.
We breath out the structure of the world. A structure is habitable. I don’t think any man could live long, even in a jail cell, without kicking a hole in the wall, or setting a doll on the pedestal, or in same way personalizing it. We own what we can control, and we control best what we create. A man can buy a house but must make a home. We own a thing by talking about it.
A house is the body of the marriage, the embodiment of the institution. When the novelty of sex matures, it must cast off its petals and grow into a mutual daily dance. It must materialize in love tokens and shared space. When we share an importance, we can work together for it. Commitment is the second leg of optimism. It is the principle of stupidity, to love something, to do something, ever and always, even if painful, even if foolish. A married man doesn’t ask if he could do better. He regards love as absolute, and agrees with Dante that the betrayal of the beloved is the sin worth the worst in hell.
Don’t marriages fail? The moment of pessimism is to expect as natural the worst; commitment is committed even in pessimism, for optimism must be willing to accept the truths of pessimism. Just as every philosophy is a philosophy about all other philosophies, and every religion has dogma regarding the other religions, so every mood has a theory of the other moods, and must think selfishly if it is to be useful to the whole. Commitment makes our union the thing, and refuses to give up on it. Only through such battles and struggles do we grow intimate again, until I have you inside me, and you have me inside you, and we look more and more alike, our gestures and body language become the same, our speech and thought becomes similar, and in the final gesture, we will share one center.
How committed should we be? Style is framed within asymptotal extremes. What do we do in extreme impossible conditions? The very idea of it frames what we do in every day things. It was said in the Sermon on the Mount that “whoever looks at a women with lust has committed adultery,” and then later that divorce was not permissible unless the partner had committed adultery. So since we commit adultery daily, our spouses can justifiably divorce us. It would have been better to say that divorce is taboo, not to be permitted, that the union of two souls is eternal: with this mythological morality we might be able to build a lasting institution. And yet you and I must stage divorces and struggles to save ourselves. All ideas require a break, all loves require a vacation. There must be an absolute balanced with its internalized exception.
We share a style; style seduced us to love, and style grows from our love. And so each work place has a style, a city has a style, every level of consciousness has a style that we fall into it. How we respond to the world’s styles situates us. A network of relationships emerges out of every system. Wherever there are people, each has a special relationship to every single other, either directly or indirectly, so that in a thick system, a man fills many roles, many masks, many personas. We directly internalize our closest friends, and are swallowed into the larger we. Us-together is a mind that thinks through us, and my individual consciousness is merely one part of a larger brain, conscious itself, and also in turn part of a larger consciousness.
All things are written; we can read each by the same method. The critic sees a style and divines its logic. All things contain sets of logic; interpretation can isolate a strain. Having insight into essentials, rather than trivialities, lets one use history, let’s one make it his own history, merges history with autobiography, as all history finally matters when it tells me my own story in a sense alienated enough for me to be objective. When I am quoted back on myself, I feel strengthened, my fire is fed. Emerson held the myth that all poetry is written in heaven before time began, and this is the effect the poet feels when his poem is perfected: not a letter could be changed. This is only an effect, just as God is only an effect; we tell stories, we make myths, and this let’s us get our work done.
All things, and especially created things, have a logic to them. Perhaps a poem, perhaps a novel, perhaps the full list of a writer’s books can be taken as one whole to analyze. Each is philosophically thick, for the philosophical is a dimension of all experience. Logic is a set of dynamic relationships that bind identify and causality. No matter how many logics can be invented, there is always the full and growing logic of the all. When the absolute grows, the new redefines the old, and yet the old is eternal and inspires everything that comes after. Is it good to be first? It is just as good to be second, third, or last. Every individual is the center of his universe.
Therefore, use the world. It will serve you. The world, the full spread of your arms, through men and women, is rich and full of hundreds of thousands of years of work. Filter your truths through many minds. Proverbs and clichés have been so proven we are sick of hearing them. Works that have been translating a million times, retold a million times, readapted into countless novels and screenplays, these might at last be interesting. I grow sick of novelty. I prefer the ordinary.
Know a philosopher by his terms. His terms reveal how he sealed his wound. The philosophical concepts he seeks fit his attitude. What does he consider worth thinking about? He values only those ideas that channel his emotions into the right circuits. All his great concepts are little more than tubes and pipes. A coinage is from personal necessity, it is the emblem of a crisis. The style of a man sinks from his lips to his thoughts, from his thoughts to his feelings, from his feelings to his needs, his inner necessity, the basis of his being. The good reader learns all.
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Perfection
Is
Easy
www.msu.edu/~junedan
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