What's not to self-love?

[imomus]

Am I a narcissist? The question itself is self-indulgent and self-absorbed, but I can't help asking it. Maybe my six years demanding your daily attention here at Click Opera have been nothing but "digital narcissism", a daily seduction, an attempt to put myself at the centre of the world, to spin myself into every story, to make myself the

Comments

[count_vronsky]

bah to psychologists, their one great achievement over the last century has been to medicalize personality. I think that if you have a flaw it is that you are too Freudian. Too much under the spell of... what did Nabokov, that ace narcissist, call him? The Viennese quack. (E Wilson once quipped that "schadenfreude" in N's case meant "hatred of freud".)

It occurred to me the other day, in one of those glittering thoughts that flitter through the twinkling jitter of alpha waves we call consciousness, that Lolita could be read as an extended joke on Freud, a rebuke of his central oedipal theory. In that it is not the secret unconscious desire of all men to kill the father and sleep with the mother, but rather our desire is to kill the mother and sleep with the daughter.



What a fall! What a silly Julia! What luck that Mr. Romeo still gripped and twisted and cracked that crooked cricoid as X-rayed by the firemen and mountain guides in the street. How they flew! Superman carrying a young soul in his embrace!
...

The surroundings were unrecognizable--except for the white wall. His heart was beating as after an arduous climb. A blond little girl with a badminton racket crouched and picked up her shuttlecock from the sidewalk. Farther up he located Villa Nastia, now painted a celestial blue. All its windows were shuttered.
...

The tap expostulated, letting forth a strong squirt of rusty water before settling down to produce the meek normal stuff--which you do not appreciate sufficiently, which is a flowing mystery, and, yes, yes, which deserves monuments to be erected to it, cool shrines!
...

I believed that the treasured memories in a dying man's mind dwindled to rainbow wisps; but now I feel just the contrary: my most trivial sentiments and those of all men have aquired gigantic proportions. The entire solar system is but a reflection in the crystal of my (or your) wrist watch... Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed.
...

This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.

- transparent things