Addendum. Heraldic Outcries.
Retractions from that last post should come in great measure. Anything I dislike about myself I can change, so I will stop evaluating my person as if it constitutes a static presence, something immutable. Instead, what I think I need to do has everything to do with figuring out why I felt like I did when I first got to college. I guess that it deals entirely with my intuiting the indifference of not only the world but of other people. I do not charge them with that as some kind of indictment, it simply exists, it cannot be helped. Like all things in this world, though, it does have its transience. People do not always remain indifferent to the lives of others but a temporary apathy proves a necessity. Essentially, all we are to other people is an extra. For nothing life-sustaining, nothing absolutely crucial to a life of significance, comes from the others around us--maybe it initially came from our environment of people that the accident of birth placed us with but it goes entirely extrinsic to that after a certain point. Anyone's relationship with anyone marks a curious thing: the balancing of needs and time and contact. Wait, I don't know if I actually believe what I said. Other people exist in this doubly way of providing meaning to our existence and at the same time always working outside of the narthex of a life's worth. That dynamic helps remind me of how alone we always are. German has this wonderful word (I can't remember the word) but it means, "I think I know what you mean," thus recognizing the inability to ever truly know another person's thoughts the way you would know your own. But I cannot deny the urge I have many times for other people, a hunger to place myself in the presence of other humans. However, all interaction with other people lacks something, it lacks the feeling arrived at from work, from creating something, from deluding ourselves with the notion of work. So many times when out with people do I feel like I could be reading and feeling alive; I love how lonely crowds can make you feel. Conversation can never quite achieve the heights of art, of emotional discovery, it only falls short of it as all conversation turns out to be is a rehearsal of curt statements and already thought out thoughts; its limits never subside. I have noticed how long it takes for myself to engage in any sort of conversation where what I want to share comes out, it takes so long for anything like that to get said that the expectation of profundity almost always falls short of its exalted needs. As Alain De Botton notes, "because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we have said, and the missed opportunity of what we have not."