What I have dealt with, as a subconcious theme of most of my writing is whether or not we belong and how we should. You can see that this implies that I've always believed that we do belong and that we should in a particular way. Now I'm not so sure.
For most of my youth I took a generational imperative for granted. In a certain way, I was correct to do so. But since most of that has been accomplished, it leaves me with a sense of apartness, which is something different from alienation in that it is not a gap that can't be bridged, but one that bespeaks a non-trivial, respectful distance. Oh, I see you way over there.
Perhaps I am mistaken to take the cue from Bloom, but the fact that he speaks of an absolute limit in getting to know others relieves me of a great insecurity in as much as I have always felt both a need to explain myself and a frustration with the overwhelming majority who still don't get it. In a way, it puts me back to what I rather obsessed over in my late 20s, the marvel that people understand each other at all. Now I accept that we don't, instead we mob up over common inside jokes. We sing the lyrics to a familiar song and we feel as though we are in communion, but we are not, we merely are similarly focused for the moment. And as I think of it, games are the same way, the point guard knows when to slow down on the fast break and knows when the forward will pass him and on what side, the no look pass is getting to know better but it is still connaitre not savoir.
So we don't actually belong. We create the illusion of imagery. But in our dreams, we only dream of our true intimates. We only dream of our childhood homes. Every other dream is a kind of Fauvist wackyland of monsters and lovers you never actually meet. Well, for me anyway.
I am taking it that Victorian manners and the excruciating tedium of the unambitious pace of a sclerotic aristocracy enforce the closest approximation of intimate society. Anti-liberty creates the bondage of intimacy. I feel that in Dickens as I felt it in Breaking Bad; this sense that literature creates the sort of symbiosis that I do not possess in life. Tangentially...
As I approached the highest levels in Amalur, resolving the ultimate faction quest of the sages, I battled the Archsage's mental demons one of which was Ambition and the other Indifference. Having won, I got to choose and I chose Indifference as a power. Indifference is the power of equanimity. I know it contradicts Ayn Rand, but perhaps now is the time to consider disinterest. For years since my 40s I have been waiting for all the kids to eat first and being a river to my people with the pride of earning and giving away. But now it all starts to feel more and more like Indifference because it surely is not Ambition. Ambition is a tool to make one's river wide and deep. Indifference serves wisdom best. It makes one confident in judgment. The Judge is critical, but does not belong.
Indifference is the mark of the Logarithmic Shadow. It is the virtue of the broad minded. It is the acceptance of the alternate paths. It is the recognition that people adapt and little is predictable. It makes the honesty of the well-wisher that much more powerful. It is robust acceptance, and it allows that which is personal prejudice and bias to be transparent.
The Judge will not belong. But the Judge approaches savoir.
The Cabin in the Woods, is the bloody explication, by the way. The Book of Eli is the denoument. The Cabin in the Woods throws innocence in a calculated way into the lava pit of self-destruction for the purpose of satiating that which would destoy the world. The innocents, not knowing the world worth saving, have to go and just let it die. (awww Foo Fighters). That's a kind of naive indifference bordering on apathy. But it is righteous in whatever way youth is - the destruction of youth is as evil as any.
The Book of Eli shows Indifference, truly, to the pain which must be born and dealt when liberation is at hand. The Walker is indifferent to individual suffering and does not belong because he bears the burden of lifting the survivalist intimate bondage. People have been reduced to animals and they know each other's stink all too well. There is no disinterest in the post-apocalyptic world, everything is too claustrophobic.
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