2001/07/20
I'm the Talking Moose. I'm Spartacus too, by the way.
I long for an art that is not anti-rational; I long for a philosophy that is not anti-poetic. I'd also like to see 8 hot dogs per package, and 8 hot dog buns per package, so it would match up. But no.
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It always makes me laugh how people want to be crazy or extreme or different. They want to "express themselves" -- but they almost always choose the most totally boring and conventional and tasteless ways to be different -- extreme sports, drugs, tattoos and piercings, shopping at Urban Outfitters, rock climbing, bungee jumping.
Like, dude, intense.
It reminds me of what Nabokov wrote about Madame Bovary:
Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
If one were to write about a modern-day Bovary, there would be no adultery in the story -- the novel's ending would be an account of a tragic death in a snowmobile-induced avalanche at Glacier National Park.
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It was someone (Socrates?) who said the unexamined life is not worth living. I don't think he meant the unanalyzed life -- I think he meant this in a philosophical way rather than a psychological way. But anyway.
And someone else (Nietszche?) said that life without music would be just a big mistake.
Here's me: the unimagined life is not worth living.
It's a sad pointer to the poverty of imagination that people feel the need to risk their lives for thrills.
"But dude, I feel totally alive when I play Russian Roulette. You just don't get it."
And then I think of Darwin, and I laugh and laugh.