Activity

Wittgenstein often compares the arbitrariness of the rules of a language to that of the rules of a game, for example, chess: "the purpose of the rules of chess is not to correspond to the essence of chess but to the purpose of the game of chess" [...] We can of course decide, while playing chess, t…

[...] For the reader, the significance of Neal's relationship with Master Gurpreet lies in how it anticipates the end of the story. Despite Neal's repeated promises to explain what happens after death, "Good Old Neon" concludes with the revelation that his entire monologue is the fantasy of a "Davi…

[...] For Watts, the chief value of Zen is that it presents the inability to control one's thoughts as proof of the fundamentally untenable distinction between intentional and unintentional acts--a recognition that gives way to a nondualistic vision of the self as fundamentally empty and interdepen…

[...] Literature is a kind of conversation about loneliness. It creates flashes where I--the reader/the writer?--feel human and less alone. Where I feel alone and human. Where I feel inhuman. Feel that I do not feel. Feel the pain of not feeling anything to avoid feeling pain. Fiction is an illusio…

In Wallace's work, the antagonism of the man who suffers and the mind which creates becomes the one of the man who is suffering of the feeling of the absence of feelings. I believe that all of David Foster Wallace's prose is about the pain of not feeling to avoid suffering. _Or the pain of not feel…