TITHONUS' DIARY!!


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various inquisitions
2003-07-31 - 12:51 a.m.

Ooh, so many tidbits, where will I start?

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Ok, firstly, mini-rant: the academic world is full of garbage literature. I mean, volumes and volumes of stuff that is not merely dull but actually pointless, lifeless, unconsidered... the work that I'm currently required to do means that I'm reading through this stuff, trying to sift out what's interesting, and it's just amazing how much crap there is. It makes me angry, and scared. Angry at all the wasted effort, and scared that I'll end up doing the same thing - writing junk papers and junk books for the sake of career advancement. A really depressing thought. I shouldn't complain. I love the good stuff and there is a lot of good stuff - even things that are wrong are interesting if they're lively, adventurous, if there's some spark in them... it's the stuff where no risks are taken, where it's all by-the-numbers journal-fodder that's so depressing.

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Right, end rant. Next thing: there's this phrase, "I could never do that" or "I couldn't do it, myself" and variations thereon, and it occurred to me that this is something that people say both in disgust and admiration. You know, it's something one might say about torturers and surgeons both. And it made me wonder, are disgust and admiration variations on the same feeling? That is, the people who we admire and the people who disgust us have in common that they appear to be alien, inhuman even, not quite like ourselves... and disgust and admiration are just the "good" and "bad" versions of that alienation. A thought.

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And there was one other thing, what was it? Um. Um...

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Ah, yes I was thinking about this thing, an essay by Gary S. Becker on "The Marriage Market". Becker's idea is pretty shallow but he got a Nobel prize for it; basically in personal relationships we are out to get what we can out of other people, that relationships are about maximizing one's advantage, that cold calculation underlies all our supposedly romantic attachments. And I remember back in high school, I used to categorise people into the ones like me, who believed in true love and all that stuff, and the ones who just wanted to be popular and so used relationships as a kind of stepping stone toward what they wanted... you could always tell who they would be interested in, what they would find attractive. I found them disgusting, I suppose because I resented their success. Anyway. A few moments ago I had this thought, maybe those calculative people, the players, actually experience romance, not as something separate from the calculation of advantage, but as something that naturally goes with it. The excitement of the game, you see, trying to win it... something like the feeling of being lost in the moment that what's-his-name describes in that movie, the feeling of being lost in the moment when you're trading shares on the stock exchange. So that the world isn't somehow reduced to numbers when it's understood this way, it's not that everything becomes disenchanted and dead, but rather, the magic just incorporates the numbers and rolls on... in a different shape, larger, but still there. I don't know. I don't know if this even makes sense. I guess I'm trying to see a common humanity in a group of people I would have once dismissed as being utterly "other". The idea seemed to have more resonance a few moments ago.

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All I do is think. I think I am too attached to being "good at thinking" whatever that means. I'm scared of life. I'm scared. I wish I could feel certain that I had something to offer... I wish I was a better person. Supposedly I believe that there isn't any such thing as "better" or "worse" persons, yet all the time I fret and worry that I'm not good enough. Garbage. I keep dismissing this stuff that I'm reading as garbage, saying that it's all the same, all the same stuff in different guises... maybe I'm not being gentle enough to notice the differences. I think I have a lot of repressed anger that I don't know what to do with. I've noticed I've been biting my finger more, more often and harder, lately. I want to be good, good good good, but I'm just... me.

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"No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive" - Hank Williams


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