julia vickerman
April 2011
15 posts
“We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human… is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.
Personally, yeah, I’m a Platonist. I think that God has particular languages, and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics.
But young adults of the nineties - who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation - today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.
You think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part.” —David Foster Wallace
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human… is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.
Personally, yeah, I’m a Platonist. I think that God has particular languages, and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics.
But young adults of the nineties - who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation - today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.
You think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part.” —David Foster Wallace
