Self-Knowledge

One of the greatest things about living in a culture that is endlessly verbal is that we can bitch about things all the time that people wouldn't even have been able to conceive of before Noah Webster went around with his fancy dictionary and started telling everyone how to speak and such. I sort of blame him for this spate of early twenty first century unhappiness.

Cave man after an incredibly long day of watching large herds of animals clip grass while he sharpens a spear, which he pretty much does every day, even though the spear tip is about as sharp as it's going to get. He comes home and his wife hasn't even made dinner yet. She mumbles something that could mean either, "Why the hell didn't you bring home some meat instead of sitting around sharpening that stick all day," or "I really enjoy chewing gravel when I'm thirsty." Honestly, he's not sure. But he's feeling, you know, a bit of ennui. Unfortunately, (obviously not) he can only communicate this ennui by drawing a picture of some stone age yahoo (himself) hunting a large animal on the open plains. The very action that he despises so wholeheartedly. But he's got to stick with what he's got, a few grunts and some cave paints.

Skip ahead to the twenty first century and that same cave man would sit down on a couch after work and tell his wife how Lee, that gd idiot kept scaring away all the buffalo by running down into the valley naked. And this because he kept drinking the night before. But really, wouldn't you if you were married to Lee's wife. Boy oh boy, he'd say. Anyhow, I wound up spending the day in the hot sun. Did you get outside at all today hon. Maybe just to chew some rocks or something. It is hotter than the fires of hell out there. Do we have that as a concept yet? And this rock I'm sitting on is god-awful. We should do something about that. And anyhow, as I'm sharpening this stake for the millionth time I start wondering, you know, to what end? To what end all this sharpening? Is this really what I was born for? Like what if I just put together some mammoth skin and made myself a nice skin and bone kite. Maybe that's what I want to do today.

Wife, attempts to choke herself on the leg bone of a large mammal.

I just think I might be unhappy. Do you ever feel that way hon? Do you ever feel like, why are we eating mammoth again? What's so wrong with ground sloth? And maybe we should stop making necklaces of human teeth. It's kind of macabre isn't it?

And so on...

On the bright side it was nice and cool in our basement this evening. Thank goodness for a warm spring.

Wallace: that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive....we're absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there's some kinds of escape--in a sort of Flannery O'Connorish way --that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are other kinds that say, "Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name, that you have a pimple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due."
And that's fine, in low doses. But there's something about the machinery of our relationship to it that makes low doses--we don't stop at low doses.