View all notes
[...] the more time you spend stuck in your head, ignoring the world, hungry for transcendence and distraction, the more superficial your life becomes. [...]
[...] when life starts to feel insubstantial, you may be tempted to abuse substances. Wallace hints at this connection between feeling insubstantial and the abuse of substances by consistently writing "Substance abuse" with a capital "S". He does so because part of what's at stake in substance abuse is a hunger for some uppercase Substance that could, for once, satisfy desire and appease the head's hunger for transcendence.
But this hunger for some final Substance is a dead end. You can't get rid of it. [...]
though Miller doesn't mention it in this chapter, this relates to SFT's desire to get all the pampering out of one's system, etc
[...] Desire naturally assumes that its own intensity is strong evidence for the existence of a correspondingly intense satisfaction. Desire assumes some correlative Substance. It invests its idol with the promise of release. But there is no such substance. [...] Desires wants to desire. It blindly wants, more than anything else, its own perpetuation. Nothing will satisfy it. [...] Desire is adaptive. No matter how great the success, its intensity is easily and upwardly adjustable. Success is no Substance. [...]
[...] Achievement can be more dangerous than failure. At least failure leaves you with the fantasy of some uppercase Substance. But imagine what happens when "you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life 'OK' as you are, in the culture, educated to assume" (IJ 680). [...]
on the Enfield Tennis Academy in IJ, and the counselors they hire to prepare kids for success
[...] These are the gods we worship: whatever coincidental Substances might promise perfect release. God has himself regularly been conceived along these lines. And the heavens where he resides have often been described as a finally satisfying place reachable only by way of death. [...]
a searing indictment of believing in heaven. I suppose Miller is a Christian who doesn't believe in heaven? or maybe he's just working on it
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
in a footnote, on why we need to reconcile this: "It's your body that dies, after all."
See also note 29
[...] There's a peculiar mix of stodgy self-satisfaction and relentless self-promotion and -branding. It's a bit like the sort of authority figure whose office wall has ever last plaque, diploma, and award he's ever gotten, and every time you come into the office you're forced to look at the wall and say something to indicate that you're impressed. [...]
(1) Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, declaimed via six-figure Uppies and their salon-tanned, morally vacant offspring, none of whom seem to be able to make it from limo door to analyst's couch without several grams of chemical encouragement;
(2) Catatonic Realism, a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, a.k.a. Bad Carver, in which suburbs are wastelands, adults automata, and narrators blank perceptual engines, intoning in run-on monosyllables the artificial ingredients of breakfast cereal and the new human non-soul;
(3) Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words "competent," "finished," "problem-free," fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing form of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical descripton; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to "show" what's "told"; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by any Freitag on any Macintosh.
wish i could find out what Updikean metaphors are like without actually having to read Updike
I'm also not entirely sure what he means by Hermeticism here. Is this just the noun form of "hermetic" (as in, closed, sealed off)? Or is he referring to the "religious, philosophical, and esoteric tradition based primarily upon writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus"
[...] My own aversion to Ultraminimalism, I think, stems from its naive pretension. The Catatonic Bunch seem to feel that simply by inverting the values imposed on us by television, commercial film, advertising, etc., they can automatically achieve the aesthetic depth popular entertainment so conspicuously lacks. Really, of course, the Ultraminimalists are no less infected by popular culture than other C.Y. writers: they merely choose to define their art by opposition to their own atmosphere. The attitude betrayed is similar to that of lightweight neo-classicals who felt that to be non-vulgar was not just a requirement but an assurance of value, or of insecure scholars who confuse obscurity with profundity. And it's just about as annoying.
But now try to recall the last time you saw the "hero" die within his drama's narrative frame. [...] The natural consequences is that today's dramatic heroes tend to be "immortal" within the frame that makes them heroes and objects of identification [...] I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is not a significant creative possibility has real costs. We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology, and live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally eternal. If we're the only animals who know in advance we're going to die, we're also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth. The danger is that, as entertainment's denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seductive, we will eventually forget what they're denials of. This is scary. Because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we're going to forget how to live.