Few people, when presented with the possibility of discussing themselves, preferred to hear of another.
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People did not see the world for what it was but for what they were.
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People manifested so many selves over a lifetime. Was only the latest valid?
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How odd that events went on regardless, leaving behind those who should have witnessed them.
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She didn’t accept that how one is how one must remain. Consistency in character was a form of tragedy.
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People kept their books, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past - the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one’s intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had included a snooze on page forty. People might be trapped inside their own heads, but they spent their lives pushing out from that locked room. It was why people produced children, why they cared about land, why nothing felt equal to one’s own bed after a long trip.
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Underneath it all, people trust in progress. Scientists will cure their lifestyle disease; the Internet will fix their love lives; technology will solve the oil crisis. Because technology is progress, and progress goes on forever. But progress played a trick. It presented the ultimate gluttony of all: those double clicks that turned everyone into rodents pressing buttons for the next sugar pellet. People who used to deride the losers for watching ten hours of TV a day won’t hesitate to click a mouse for longer. ‘Did she answer my email yet?’ That’s the new obesity. And nobody admits it even happened. The sci-fi movies got it wrong. No robots marched in to enslave humanity. What happened was far more ingenious: the servants became masters by their perfect affability. No microchip was implanted in any human head. People just handed over their brains. The real clash of civilizations wasn’t between Islam and the West, or China and America. It was between what people had been and what they’ve become.
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There aren’t places anymore, duck. No locations now, just individuals. You didn’t hear? Everyone’s their own nation, with their own blog. Because everybody has something important to say; everybody’s putting out press releases on what they ate for breakfast. It’s the era of self-importance. Everyone’s their own world. Doesn’t matter where people are. Or where I was.
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Obviously, I’d prefer that no place fell into ruin and no one suffered. But success requires failure, sadly. Success is relative: you make a billion while everyone else makes a billion and one, then you just got poorer. Individuals don’t rise together. That's a great lie of our time, like this myth of meritocracy: ‘Work hard enough and you will make it! Just want it enough!’ Everyone does want it enough. But only a few can win and nearly all will lose. People can’t accept this, so they convince themselves that, secretly, privately, in their own terms, they’re not failures. But, ah well, the individual ego, like the national ego, is wonderfully impervious to fact.
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People who must have a child to be kind are missing something in their emotional setup; they require someone’s neediness to give their lives meaning. Life has enough meaning and beauty already. Discovering that is a proper pursuit.
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But people are so frightened of being left alone that they collect all these malformed relationships. Accepting loneliness is everything.
