candidacy for being

[eros_in_uranium]

Or - we now approach one of the most subtle and urgent suggestions of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - what is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example, and especially when we fall deeply, hopelessly, brutally, stupidly in love.

Comments

[eros_in_uranium]

The way Sartre lived, you can even say the way he orchestrated his life, everything was consciously and intentionally done, nothing coincidental in the choices he made. When we talk about his appeal, it's difficult to separate the man from his life, the ideas from the practices. Existence precedes essence; man can invent himself every minute; I make my choice and therefore I am, the kind of Sartrean declarations have ingrained themselves in our consciousness without us even noticing them. Perhaps that's the best contribution he could have made. It could almost sound like a cliche to say how we live our lives are more worth investigating than what kind of lives we have, but if we really come down to it, few of us can ever say we don't care about the end results or the approval from others and ourselves. The sense of well-being is almost always structural, knowing where we are in life and in society, which location and floor and room we reside in. It comes from the security of self-knowledge, like the structural integrity of architecture. But Sartre made people see the self is not to be trusted and self-deception is inevitable because no one can be what he is and it's all about what he thinks he is. Authenticity according to Sartre is not a reward, not a feel-good state of being, not something the mind can rest on, but a burden, a burden nevertheless we have to carry if we are to be intellectually, ethically honest. We can dispute and fault Sartre's philosophical offering but intuitively we know we have to examine the world and ourselves the way Sartre did - there is no way out but through the negation or transcendence of the self in every waking hour. If we have an emotional delay and indifference to Sartre's words, it's because we want to resist him, because the most free people are the loneliest people who are on their own, who can take comfort in nothing but their abilities to make choices, right choices or wrong ones. Human being are doomed to be free, as one of Sartre's most poignant if also theatrical statements claims. It's a lot easier to be bourgeois and conformist when people's choices are made for them, when people surrender their unnerving freedom for the serenity of structural belonging. It's within the human nature to be what a person is not, to sacrifice his humanism for the magic of happiness and being someone. I think Sartre's appeal ultimately lives on in the courage to join the few and not the many. Whenever there is an existential crisis, and it could happen any minute, without warning, when everything we have built our lives on dissipates and the ground sinks away, when we are at the peak of our confidence and euphoria and love and promise, when we suddenly, violently feel the despair that we have never lived the way we should have lived. When the world is suddenly such an unbearable place, we get on the train with Sartre. We listen to him speak and in his presence we decide where to get off with the first choice we make in a series of choices, breathing the light of our first day as a free person, relishing the vista of its loneliness and possibilities.

I have listened to couple Hotel Costes Cd's before, and there are a lot more I haven't (I think there are 8 of them that have been released so far), so thank you for the note. Oh how I am still patiently waiting to receive something from you, a letter in your handwriting, a delicate watercolor of your thoughts, a swirling piece of Kelsey.