From "'Don’t Describe It, Remember It'/The author’s diaries from 1954" by Mavis Gallant (The New Yorker).
August 15, 2022
"Solitude has become such a habit that it is disturbing to find I no longer notice anything or anyone except the things I wish to see."
"It was so disturbing today—this habit—that at the Tate I forced myself to take notice of the shape of the room I was standing in: because, like a dream or a fog, I existed and the paintings existed. Everything else melted like water. In a crowd I suddenly waken from an interior life and force myself to see and recognize the faces."
From "'Don’t Describe It, Remember It'/The author’s diaries from 1954" by Mavis Gallant (The New Yorker).
From "'Don’t Describe It, Remember It'/The author’s diaries from 1954" by Mavis Gallant (The New Yorker).
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6 comments:
A burden-free existence until the neighborhood is seeded.
Kinky Friedman has a great line in his song Wild Man of Borneo. And it's certainly applicable to those of us who live in a severely divided country.
The line goes, "They come to see what they want to see, but they never come to know."
The Kinkster is wiser than the average bear.
"'Don’t Describe It, Remember It'
today, people don't describe it; they post a picture of it. Then, two days later, if you ask them were they were when they took that pic; they say: "I don't know; what does my caption say?"
People aren't living anymore, they are photographing it. Whenever something happens, people shield their eyes with their phones. No One dares see something actual.. All MUST BE digitized
I vant to be alone...
Sounds like Long Covid.
The sad thing is the most beautiful and powerful thing in life is empathy (there are other beautiful and powerful things, but no artist has ever shown any of them as being more beautiful and powerful than successful empathy), and it is so easy to fool yourself into thinking you have it when you don't, especially if you have poetic ambitions.
I have read an awful lot of bad poetry over the years - it almost hurts to think about it - and I have lived a long time, and after all these years I have realized that bad poetry almost always stems from the poet mistakenly thinking they have an insight into empathy while lacking the thing they think they are praising.
On the bright side, most of us are not poets, and have no poetic ambitions, and even actual bad poets are not bad poets for most of the time: for the true bad poet it is just a hobby, and when they talk about it it is just something their friends listen to with indulgence, one hopes, before passing on to discussions of better things.
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