Monday, April 28, 2003
I've put my Playstation away.
The problem with me is that I like being bored. And when you like behind bored you find yourself actively seeking out things to not do. For all my existential philosophy and refutation of the soul; for all my talk of life being about finding your own purpose; my own purpose is un-purpose, not-purpose. The bits of life I enjoy most are the bits that are not there in any memorable, recountable way.
I'm not even sure this is about sublimation of the self, about the immersement of yourself in something greater than you, the state of being-at-one-with-the-task which, say, Lyra in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials triology posits herself in when reading the alethiometer. It's not about losing yourself in a crowd at a gig or a a nightclub. It's about being able to turn off one's brain, maybe...
There's the line in On The Road about how the only people worth bothering with are the ones "who burn like roman candles", the ones "who never say a commonplace thing..." and sometimes I agree with that and sometimes I don't, but it's less and less lately... Hell, more than a few years ago a friend bought me the first volume of Hunter S Thompson's letters for a birthday present, saying that I was like him, that I burnt and was angry and passionate and that the stuff I wrote was unmeasured, that it spilt onto the page (screen, these days) like bile, like I would open up my chest and chuck-up all my insides for your perusal and amusement and catharsis...
These days I don't burn so much, do I? I'm more measured... I need to unite the two. I've learnt so much and now I know that I know so little; I've seen a small section of how much knowledge and wisdom and art and passion and stuff there is out there and realised that even what I've seen is only the tiniest fragment, unrepresentative and unreal...
4/28/2003 09:10:00 am
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