You think about the fact that you started writing this, in the evening, because you were feeling ill at ease, and because you hoped that—in putting your thoughts on the page—you would be able to feel better, or at least discover the reason for your anxieties. You had intended to describe a day, but never got past the morning. Maybe you are easily distracted; but, the experiment seems to have worked, as you feel much better for having written.
You think about one scene in The Pursuit of Happyness, in which Will Smith memorizes the phone number he needs to call to get his job, without a pen and paper to write it down, and you think about how he repeats that number to himself relentlessly and anxiously, desperately searching for somewhere to write it down. You think about how that film, especially that scene, demonstrates our fragility as human beings. You think about how your thoughts instantaneously jump from one thought to the next, how much of what we consider to be normal modes of expression rely on censuring those intermediating thoughts that we deem to be irrational or extraneous. You wonder how many beautiful ideas and thoughts have been lost in that process, and attempt to preserve your own memories, by writing them down, because of it.
In Will Smith’s desperate grimace, you see yourself struggling with ADD, trying desperately to focus, endlessly repeating to yourself that you need to focus. You think about how the word “focus” always carries within it a Stoic idea that we may choose where to direct our thoughts, that we can keep our mind under our own reigns. But, the herculean effort that it requires to do even a simple cognitive task, like remembering a phone number, helps you to realize that it’s difficult for all of us, even as it also makes you worry that it’s hopeless. The line of thinking where you consider all our thoughts as being flat—as a kind of loose association, a leaping from one term to the next, conditioned by one’s personal and collective histories, by the connotations of each term—worries you, as it is easy to then think that we have no agency, that we are always catching up on what has already occurred and been pre-determined.
You think about how human beings are still only animals, following their instincts, with limited capacity for memory, consciousness and innovation. You think about the entomologist and socio-biologist E.O. Wilson’s claim that the only difference between ant and human behaviors is a divergent evolutionary history, and that all culture can be explicated through evolutionary analysis. You very much dislike Wilson’s claims, as well as the haughty way that he presents them; but, in your darkest moments, you sometimes worry that he may be correct.
You think about Dave Matthews Band’s “Ants Marching”—of those time-lapse shots in nature shows like BBC’s Earth, as well as those time-lapse shots of planes, trains and automobiles that you see in advertising—and wonder if human beings are as great and as unique as we would like to suppose ourselves to be. On public transportation, you often think about how strange it is that we, as human beings, have gathered and isolated ourselves in these enclosed spaces, where our only contact with other species comes in the form of hamburgers, potted vegetation, and the occasional emotional support animal.
You get particularly nauseated when you think about all the people you see as sweaty, panting blobs of flesh who are always eyeing each other—or are ogling the gigantic, smiling faces attached to scantily clad bodies, plastered above them—desperately hoping to rub their bodies on somebody else’s. You think about the way that, in Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor often describes people as they appear: a leg arising out of the water, a pig-like face—as mere body parts, often dismembered, dissociated from the transcendental and humane identity that one normally thinks of when thinking of the totality of the body. You think about the fact that O’Connor’s titular theme is that we are all just flesh, that all our thoughts and emotions—even our divine truths and our wisdom—have to be felt and encoded in our bodies, like the blood that speaks to us.
(You think about an interview that DFW gave on Charlie Rose, where he said that the paradigm of Lynchian film par excellence was a woman’s head found in the freezer, next to the sausage meat, which comes about 7 minutes into the video. You think about DFW’s intention, which is to describe the cruel indifference of consumption under capitalism, with a note of patriarchal violence, but you also think about the parallels between DFW’s example and O’Connor’s motif of disembodiment. You think about Rose’s being accused of sexual misconduct, as well as the accusations against DFW of his being emotionally abusive, and these thoughts bring you again to the existential horror that human beings are just animals, unable to supersede the kind of hideous men that socio-biologists like E.O. Wilson argue we are biologically ingrained to be.)
You think about the sounds that are playing in each passerby’s headphones—one crooning about lost love, another pining for some meaningful attachment, others bragging about the frequency and quality of their sex as well as the attractiveness and size of their own body parts. You don’t think of the people who orchestrated these sounds as some puppet-masters—beyond the animal instincts of the masses, whom they are intentionally controlling—but as people who are painfully shallow and sincere in their desire, as people whom we have chosen to reward for their capacity to express our desire. You think about these synthetic and high-pitched sounds as being little different from the dull clanging of sticks and stones that must have taken place millennia ago. You think of it all as an endless clamor, and think of Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and that unforgettable line from Macbeth, that this is all just sound and fury, signifying nothing.
At the same time, when you have these moments of Sartrean Nausea, you worry that you might be some sort of extraterrestrial, that there might be something wrong with you for having these thoughts, that you might never be able to express yourself to these people in a way that they could understand you, that these same people—with whom you, just like everyone else, would like to be able to successfully converse and rub bodies—might come after you with torches and pitchforks, or that you might never again be able to have the pleasure of forgetting this way of thinking.
You think about Kafka’s Hunger Artist, whose protagonist goes days in a cage without eating as a circus performance, and who eventually dies of starvation, not because he was so great at fasting, but because—unlike everyone else—he could never find anything he enjoyed eating. You think about the fact that you occasionally express your distaste of the world to others, and that those who claim to understand you express admiration of you for having that distaste, but you have trouble explaining to them that you do not think of yourself as any kind of artist—that the great tragedy lies in the fact that, despite knowing that this continuous mastication is meaningless, you still wish to be able to partake in it, to enjoy its absurdity. For what use is it to know how selfish and animalistic we all are, if you are unable to end the suffering of others, and if you yourself are suffering from your inability to successfully be selfish?
You think about Kafka’s suffering from depression—how he grew frail and thin at the hospital, having entirely lost his appetite—and wonder if you yourself may be depressed. You think about the scene in Nausea where the protagonist watches everyone eat oysters and shellfish, only to look down, disgusted, at his own plate, totally dissatisfied with the consumption that surrounds him. You think about how repulsive, spiky and slimy sea creatures form a motif within Nausea, as well as the rumor that, after a particularly bad exposure to psychedelics, Sartre kept hallucinating that giant crabs were after him. You wonder if all these supposedly great insights are nothing more than the results of neuro-chemical imbalances.
You think about Giacomo Leopardi’s own struggle with disability, his loss of agency under his family’s pressures, and of his Dialogo della natura e di un islandese (Dialogue between Nature and an Islander), where Nature is presented as a kind of giant, cosmic dominatrix, indifferent to the conditions of mankind. You worry that we are nothing more than machines not of our own making, that we may just be slapped down, without anesthetic, on some cosmic creature’s operating table—to be shocked, poked, probed and prodded, as we suffer endless paroxysms of instinct, pain and desire.
You think about how difficult it is to hold ourselves together through time, but hope—like Will Smith praying that he can remember the phone number, flexing all his willpower and intellectual fiber in attempting to remember that number—that we are still capable of doing so, and that we may yet achieve great things because of it. At the same time, you hope somehow that all your countless hours spent on reading, even though you could not blurt them all out at once, are still somehow accessible—that you can rely on your learning as a kind of unseen inheritance, to come to you in times of need and utility, that your instincts may lead you rightly, that your mode of thinking—your very mode of being-with-the-world—is not pathological or hopeless.
You think about the fact that you had decided to use second person singular because you thought that it would make your narrative more instantaneous, would put your reader directly in your perspective, and that it would thereby render these connections as they present themselves to you, when they present themselves to you. You think about the extent to which the uses of the present tense and the second person have been fictional, insofar as you have to project your experiences onto a map of another time and place, and have to hope that your projection catches the moment rightly. You wonder to what extent we are ever really here, and where that here might be, and to what extent we are projecting that “here” from somewhere that’s already over there by now. You wonder if that sentence makes sense to anyone, or if it’s even a healthy way of thinking.
You wonder if your effort has been generative, such that people will be able to understand and appreciate your ideas upon reading them, or to what extent your ideas are pathological—obsessing over what’s already been done, or over what cannot be feasibly accomplished. You wonder to what extent you have revealed gems, hidden in those moments between moments—and to what extent you have poured out an ocean of drivel, confessing all your meaningless self-talk.
You hope that your ideas are normal, so that other people are able to understand them, so that these connections make sense. You think about the extent to which your use of second person singular is directed towards your later self, the extent to which you are still unknown to yourself, the extent to which you hope to be able to remember and later understand yourself, the extent to which you do not want this moment to pass senselessly, the extent to which you fear a cold, amnesiac and entropic death.
You think about all the time that you spent thinking about time, free will, and meaning—as a result of the constant word “focus.” You think about all the time you spent reading about time, free will, and meaning—as a result of that word “focus,” and as a result of your anxieties about that word. You think about the fact that you do not want all that effort to have been wasteful, that you want it to find a place in the world, that you want it to physically exist in the universe, even though you cannot identify it in notes or in a deep well of memory. You think about Will Smith repeating that number to himself, and wonder if you will be able to stop murmuring to yourself, now that you’ve written your thoughts down.