A Very Odd Kind of Déjà Vu
May. 26th, 2018 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
A little while ago I picked up a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's hefty philosophical tome Being and Nothingness at a used book store in Providence. I know, I have odd tastes, but there it was, and Sartre's one of the thinkers who's been on my get-to list for a long time. I also know that most people don't do well plunging headfirst into an 812-page doorstop of a book with no previous exposure to existentialism other than a few scraps in college thirty-five years ago, but that's also my style -- put it down to a youthful infatuation with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but big books don't scare me, and I'd rather get the whole picture in a single massive lump than have to piece things together from more obviously accessible books. So I launched into Being and Nothingness, and as I got used to Sartre's technical language, which is fairly opaque -- he's a twentieth century philosopher, after all -- I noticed something very odd: a peculiar kind of déjà vu.
It's not as though I've read Being and Nothingness before -- I'm quite sure I haven't. It's as though I'm encountering, for the first time, the systematic logic behind the way the world has always appeared to me.
Sartre makes sense to me. The way he puts consciousness at the center of the human experience, rather than (say) the reasoning mind or the will; the way that he distinguishes between the ordinary engagement of consciousness in the details of everyday life, in which the big questions stay hidden, and the experience of disengagement through reflection, in which a dizzying gap opens up between consciousness and all its objects; the incisive way in which he shows that deterministic theories that reject the freedom of the will (as popular in his time as ours) are simply ways to try to evade the consequences of reflection, and try to be something the way a rock is a rock, which is the one thing consciousness can never do -- it all makes a very peculiar kind of intuitive sense, not as though I've thought these things before, but as though these things are implied by the way I naturally think, and I'd have known them if I'd followed things out systematically enough.
It's an intriguing experience. I'm left wondering if I read the existentialists in my last lifetime -- I died around 1960 that time around, so the time factor works out nicely -- and they made enough of an impression on me that the habits of thought made the leap between lives. Or is it just that my mentality is the kind that fits an existentialist model unusually well?
Another kind of déjà vu
Date: 2018-05-28 04:01 am (UTC)“To write, one should read very carefully, that’s all. See all the different ways Hemingway or Annie Proulx build a sentence, for example. Teachers and writing workshops aren’t just useless, for the most part, but likely harmful, for you’re prone to be learning from not just a failed writer but someone who’s hustling for a deeply corrupt and intellectually crippling institution, an American university. On top of that, you’ll receive idiotic inputs from your fellow students. Although people can learn directly from Celine, Paul Bowles and Whitman, etc., at minimal cost, many are still willing to go into suicidal debt to receive instructions from a cast of dishonest incompetents, and they do this because they’re much more interested in networking than writing.
“Use what you learn from even the most unpleasant labor to inform your writing. Money is time, and since you need as much time as possible to observe, think and write, you must cut out all unnecessary expenses. Since it’s hard enough to just live, much less live and write, you must be willing to sacrifice many creature comforts, and even emotional ones, in the pursuit of a craft that may, in the end, yield no success whatsoever.”
http://www.neonpajamas.com/blog/linh-dinh-interview
Re: Another kind of déjà vu
Date: 2018-05-29 02:26 pm (UTC)