#1: ""I am afraid I don't get a word of what you are saying. Could you please speak more plainly?"
"All right, let me put it in simple terms: The grass is always greener on the other side."
"Which means?"
"It means if you have a baby, you will always be envious of women who don't have children and focus fully on their careers. If you choose to focus on your career, however, you will always envy women who have kids. Whichever path you choose, your mind will be obsessed with the option you have discarded."
"Is there no way out of this dilemma?" I ask.
She shakes her head desolately. "Envy lies at the root of our existential angst. Look at the history of mankind, all the wars and destruction. Do you know what they said when World War I broke out? The war that will end all wars! Of course that is not what happened. The wars didn't end because there is no equality and no justice. Instead we have an imbalance of power and income, ethnic and religious clashes... All of this is bound to generate new conflicts."
I take a long, deep breath. "You are making me depressed."
"You ought to be depressed," she says, wagging a finger in my face. "To live means to be saddled with melancholy. It is no coincidence that Paul Klee painted the Angel of History so lonely and hopeless. Remember the look on the face of Angelus Novus. I highly recommend that you read Walter Benjamin on..."
"You are making me soooo depressed," I interject.
She stares at me as if seeing me for the first time. "Oh, I see. In the age of Internet and multimedia, no one has the time or patience for in-depth knowledge anymore. All right, I will cut to the chase."
"Please."
"My point is, whichever woman you will grow into, you will wish to be the Other. According to the great French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the essence of ethics is the point where you come face-to-face with the Other. Of course, from a phenomenological stance, we could speak of the 'other' inside the 'I.'"
"Ugh, hm!" I say.
"Read Heidegger to see how a human being, any human being, cannot be taken into account unless seen as an existent among the things surrounding him, the key to all existence being Dasein, which is being-in-the-world." She widens her dark green eyes at me. "Therefore, my answer to your banal question is as follows: It doesn't really matter."
"What do you mean?" I say, trying to keep frustration from my voice.
"Whether you don't have children or you have half a dozen of them, it is all the same," she says with customary assurance. "In the end, it all boils down to the envy of the Other, and to deep existential dissatisfaction. Humans do not know how to be satisfied. Like Cioran said, we are all sentenced to fall inside ourselves and be miserable.""
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#2: "For many centuries all around the globe, girls and women have been expected to conform to one set of attributes, while men and boys measure up to another. If and when the traits of an individual included elements from both sets, life became much more complicated. Even today, a woman is thought to be "manly" can face a bulwark of reactions, as can a man who is deemed "womanly." The more conventional the society is, the less likely the two sets intersect-- at least outwardly. But the exclusivist approach to gender relations is by no means specific to traditional societies. Though constantly changing, it is fundamentally universal. From ancient myths to modern graphic novels, from folklore to advertisements, this dualistic way of thinking has infiltrated many areas of our lives.
Man Woman
Masculine Feminine
Bold Modest
Dominant Passive
Culture Nature
Day Night
Rational Emotional
Brain Body
Intelligible Sensitive
Vertical Horizontal
Moving Settled
Polygamous Monogamous (or multiple partners)
Doer Talker
Objective Subjective
Logos Pathos
Oddly enough, women too, are used to thinking of themselves in these terms. The relationships we build with one another, the talks we have among ourselves and the way we raise our own daughters are overshadowed by the dichotomy of gender patterns.
How much of womanhood is biological, how much of it is socially learned? Of the will to become a mother, which part is innate, which part is imposed? [....]
When everything is so culturally loaded, how am I going to know what is really natural and what is environmental?"
GOOD QUESTION!
#3: ""No man can use his brain to think for another," Ayn Rand was fond of saying. "All functions of the body and spirit are private. Therefore they cannot be shared or transferred." Strikingly, she regarded "reason" not only as the basis for our individual choices but also as the foundation of love between opposite sexes. Even physical attraction, for her, was the working of the brain. Love, sex, and desire might seem to be selfish if left untamed by society, but despite that, or perhaps precisely because of it, they rendered the human individual an object worthy of attraction and appreciation. As it was maintained in The Fountainhead, "To say 'I love you,' one must know first how to say the 'I.'""
The crux of my existence right now. For the first time in a long time, the hours I spend not working are greater than the hours I spend working. I have an unusual amount of free time... to evidently think about silly questions like, "What am 'I'?" I say 'silly' because when you're poor, you don't have time to think of what 'I' is. Only comfortable people have time to think existentially.
.......and I just happen to be comfortably poor! I have saved enough for tuition for next semester (a Christmas miracle!) and I recently and triumphantly walked out of my day job. I feel as though a break should certainly be allowed, where one can sit on her ass for hours on end, avoiding anything useful and wondering why at the end of the day there isn't much of an 'I' to begin with. I've come to the conclusion that one is happier when one is in a routine/focused on survival and never has the chance to confront oneself. Well, at least delusionally happy. Now I'm stuck with all this time and no delusions.
But then again, I guess it doesn't really matter.
But it does. It matters to me. I want to be someone I'm proud of, even though I've lost the ideological luster of my teen years where all I wanted to do was move to Africa, dedicate my life to eradicating poverty and abolishing capitalism/sexism, and after which, in my old age, live among pandas. But alas, I've realized I ain't gonna do shit and the world fucking sucks. In other words, I am now a grumpy, cynical, pragmatic though ironically (yet proudly) still otherwise foolish, 23 yr old. Obviously, something needs to change. And apparently the first thing that strikes me as necessary during this time of crisis, are adult swim lessons. That's right. Adult swim lessons. Saturday mornings at the community center down the street, and pretty reasonably priced I've gotta say.
(I'm also applying to mentor(/corrupt) a young child at an orphanage, which I'm fairly certain I'm going to get chosen for. I may lack hope in the planet, but I still have some in myself. *CONFIDENCE* Unfortunately, I'm not particularly keen on children that are not cute Asian babies, but how could I miss the chance to foster spawn to assist in my life's quest of hacking the Domino's Pizza website and redirecting all Cinnastix purchases to my address?)
ADD NOTE: I also learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald stole lines from his wife, even entire excerpts from her diary. I had naively accepted that Fitzgerald was a genius. Gives new meaning to "behind every great man there is a great woman." More like, "behind every great man, there are FUCKING LIES."
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#4: "He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true, but because if was the faith of one's fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?
Maybe there was no true religion. Yes, he had allowed himself to think this. He wanted to be able to tell someone of his suspicion that men had made their gods and not the other way around. He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the center of things, not God. It is man at the heart and the bottom and the top, man at the front and the back and the side, man the angel and the devil, the miracle and the sin, man and always man, and let us henceforth have no other temples but those dedicated to mankind. This was his most unspeakable ambition: to found the religion of man. [...] If man had created god then man could uncreate him too. Or was it possible for a creation to escape the power of the creator? Could a god, once created, become impossible to destroy? Did such fictions acquire an autonomy of the will that made them immortal? The emperor did not have the answers, but the questions themselves felt like answers of a kind."
*indifferent voice* oh no.... it's too late
ADD NOTE: The most sexist book I have ever read. Once I finished this novel, I put it down and promptly (and purposefully) forgot everything. The first novel I've read by Salman Rushdie, and probably the last. All I've taken away is that Rushdie writes like he's creating an endless run-on sentence that's amazingly beautiful but ultimately confusing because it does eventually come to an end, you forgot what the original point was, and your mind is heavy with the sad load of garbage you just consumed.
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