we young.

the following is a passage from page 694 of david foster wallace's novel--and my current hobby--Infinite Jest. i'm genuinely not sure how much sense it will make without knowing the book, but i figured it was worth a try. someone may get something out of it. but if you don't know the context, don't read too much into the political aspects. i think this resounds with me largely because i currently live in a country where people rarely show emotion or sentiment (in my experience.) but i do think he also speaks to an american generation that i absolutely grew up in and am part of. but it may not be only in the US. it really makes me wonder about why, though. why do we--young, old, american, japanese, whoever--so fear ourselves?


"We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete on this continent...[and] naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America....[It's] about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic... One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulls and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia."

the books you love.

Live for awhile in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books—of this I am certain—will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.

R.M. Rilke
Viareggio, April 5, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

smiling.

i am still here.

i am thinking of the fading summer,
and the emerging fall.
i am thinking of distance
and solitude.
i am infinitely jesting
and foolishly investing
in cheap wine.
and i am thinking
about smiling.

kait


"Those who are beautiful—
who can keep them as they are?
Unceasingly in their faces
the life in them arises and goes forth.
Like dew from morning grass,
like steam from a plate of food,
what is ours goes out from us.

Where does a smile go, or the upward glance,
the sudden warm movement of the heart?
Yet that is what we are. Does the universe
we dissolve into
taste of us a little?"

'Where does a smile go?' by R.M. Rilke