The doll's trying to kill me and the toaster's laughing at me
I'm convinced that my fridge is colder than my freezer.
Also, my dishwasher eats plates.
OK, moving on. Finished Private Sea last night, and I wanted to post just one more snippet.
I didn't want it.
But who was I, who didn't want it? I was Everybody, the Self. And now I knew what the little selves were for, I thought. They were a fiction designed to protect the Self from the knowledge of its own Being--to keep the Self from going mad. For surely, without them, the Self might be driven to insanity by the thought of its own audacity, and the thought of its loneliness, and the thought as well of the danger it was in. And it was in danger, I knew that perfectly well. Since it was All That There Was, there was nothing to assure it of its own immortality. And in fact, I could sense, there was that which resisted both its Being and Becoming. And this something was nothing more than Nothingness itself, against which the Self had exerted its will to Become. Thus the ontic anxiety, as Tillich expressed it: the ultimate fear of ultimate non-Being. Or so it seemed... I now understood with perfect clarity the meaning of a passage that had always haunted me in Unamuno's story of the good priest Don Emmanuel. That saintly man had preached to his flock the word of God and the message of salvation, which gave them great joy. There were those, however, who perceived that Don Emmanuel himself was a tormented soul, and one day, while walking in the countryside, a villager name Lazarus begged the priest to tell him the truth--the truth above all! And all a-tremble, Don Emmanuel whispered into the ear of him who had asked: "The truth? The truth Lazarus, is perhaps something so unbearable, so terrible, something so deadly, that simple people could not live with it!"
Now I thought that I knew this truth: the deadly and unbearable truth that nobody created us . . . we created ourselves. That was the horror that we could not live with, I thought--anything rather than that.... I thought that Freud didn't know what he was talking about, and the unconscious was very simple really: the unconscious was this knowledge I now had of ultimate Being, and our repressions of it had their roots in an existential terror, not neurosis. It was real, and it was horrifying. It was more than most of us could accept, and thus we too refuge in smaller identities and well-defined roles, creating a limited world we could comfortably live in, pretending all the time there was Something Else. But there was nothing else, and deep down inside us we knew it, and we suffered. It took courage to Be, just as Tillich said, and most of us didn't have that courage. So we rejected our Being--and not by killing ourselves, because death was impossible, but by denying out real identity. By refusing to face what we actually were.
"Jim," I said, "we're all there is."
"That's right, buddy boy."
Also, my dishwasher eats plates.
OK, moving on. Finished Private Sea last night, and I wanted to post just one more snippet.
I didn't want it.
But who was I, who didn't want it? I was Everybody, the Self. And now I knew what the little selves were for, I thought. They were a fiction designed to protect the Self from the knowledge of its own Being--to keep the Self from going mad. For surely, without them, the Self might be driven to insanity by the thought of its own audacity, and the thought of its loneliness, and the thought as well of the danger it was in. And it was in danger, I knew that perfectly well. Since it was All That There Was, there was nothing to assure it of its own immortality. And in fact, I could sense, there was that which resisted both its Being and Becoming. And this something was nothing more than Nothingness itself, against which the Self had exerted its will to Become. Thus the ontic anxiety, as Tillich expressed it: the ultimate fear of ultimate non-Being. Or so it seemed... I now understood with perfect clarity the meaning of a passage that had always haunted me in Unamuno's story of the good priest Don Emmanuel. That saintly man had preached to his flock the word of God and the message of salvation, which gave them great joy. There were those, however, who perceived that Don Emmanuel himself was a tormented soul, and one day, while walking in the countryside, a villager name Lazarus begged the priest to tell him the truth--the truth above all! And all a-tremble, Don Emmanuel whispered into the ear of him who had asked: "The truth? The truth Lazarus, is perhaps something so unbearable, so terrible, something so deadly, that simple people could not live with it!"
Now I thought that I knew this truth: the deadly and unbearable truth that nobody created us . . . we created ourselves. That was the horror that we could not live with, I thought--anything rather than that.... I thought that Freud didn't know what he was talking about, and the unconscious was very simple really: the unconscious was this knowledge I now had of ultimate Being, and our repressions of it had their roots in an existential terror, not neurosis. It was real, and it was horrifying. It was more than most of us could accept, and thus we too refuge in smaller identities and well-defined roles, creating a limited world we could comfortably live in, pretending all the time there was Something Else. But there was nothing else, and deep down inside us we knew it, and we suffered. It took courage to Be, just as Tillich said, and most of us didn't have that courage. So we rejected our Being--and not by killing ourselves, because death was impossible, but by denying out real identity. By refusing to face what we actually were.
"Jim," I said, "we're all there is."
"That's right, buddy boy."