Althouse: "the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong — that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo..."

June 12, 2013

"the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong — that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo..."

"... as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder."

The definition of "pâro" in "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows," via Metafilter, where they are concentrating not "pâro" on but "sonder," which doesn't seem to me like a sorrow at all.

19 comments:

edutcher said...: Sounds like being Conservative in ObamAmerica; 6/12/13, 12:33 PM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: That video is not my cup of tea. Too diffuse. Torpid.

When you want to illustrate an obscure sorrow, you want clarity.

You want energy.

You want this.; 6/12/13, 12:38 PM
Achilles said...: I thought the whole time there was a point to that video. Maybe lurking... towards the end...

Instead it looks like some college student had too much time on his hands and tried to be Pithy.; 6/12/13, 12:42 PM
KCFleming said...: "pâro" = white American male; 6/12/13, 12:43 PM
ricpic said...: Anybody in a subway station is by definition trapped in sorrow.; 6/12/13, 12:47 PM
KCFleming said...: The filmmaker was aiming for a Terrence Malick tone poem vibe.

Quite beautiful, if you're a sucker for that style like I am. It tends toward the sentimental, with an intellectual gloss.; 6/12/13, 12:53 PM
Ann Althouse said...: I was dubious about the video, but I there was a point when I decided it made the cut for embedding. It was the idea of being an extra in a scene in someone else's movie.; 6/12/13, 12:58 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: That video takes me back to being a kid. I thought about that all the time. As a child, I found the immensity of this unknowable to be upsetting.; 6/12/13, 1:15 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: Under pâro, see also 'adolescence.'; 6/12/13, 1:19 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: What a great website!; 6/12/13, 1:28 PM
ricpic said...: No one ever has to call the plumber in Terrence Malick world.; 6/12/13, 1:29 PM
KCFleming said...: Not true! He has filmed farming (Days of Heaven), serial murder (Badlands), and war (The Thin Red Line).

It would be the most achingly beautiful plumbing you ever saw.

Or you would hate it.
Those seem to be the conclusions drawn.; 6/12/13, 1:56 PM
Rabel said...: Gag - to choke or cause to retch.

Me - objective case of I.

With - used as a function word to indicate the means, cause, agent, or instrumentality.

A - indefinite article.

Spoon - an eating or cooking implement consisting of a small shallow bowl with a relatively long handle.; 6/12/13, 1:58 PM
Rusty said...: ""the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong — that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo...""

Yeah. Well. Tough shit.; 6/12/13, 2:41 PM
Rusty said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 6/12/13, 2:41 PM
ErnieG said...: That brought back memories of deep, profound conversations far into the night in the dormitory, but we were undergraduates then, and hardly sober.; 6/12/13, 3:03 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: "the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong — that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo..."

But then, sometimes there are coincidences to liven things up a little. Even though they don't mean anything to anybody other than to you the person experiencing it, they do, at least for me, serve as a welcomed break from the countdown to nowhere.

I got a call yesterday from someone the phone caller ID was telling was an old friend I had lost contact with.

Back in 08 she had gone to live with the father of her baby, so, drifting apart, losing contact was natural.

But when I picked up the call, it wasn't the old friend, but it was someone else contacting me about a speaking engagement I've volunteered to book. I was taken a back a little. I asked the person calling for the name of my old friend, and he said no, this is so and so, I got your number via so and so, and I'm calling about this and that.

What are the chances that a dropped number from someone I used to know, is randomly assigned to somebody new, as dropped numbers do and that random person ends up calling me?

I wanted to tell this story last night but I had to abstain do to the absence of a Café.

But then here it is, a chance to share my story with my extras.; 6/12/13, 3:25 PM
Dante said...: It's worse than that:

“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

Milan Kundera, "The unbearable lightness of being."; 6/12/13, 6:16 PM
Astro said...: How can you 'cross' a taboo? Commit, yes; violate, ok; but cross? - that's just the wrong verb.; 6/12/13, 6:53 PM