For both Darwin and Freud the idea of death saves us from the idea that there is anything to be saved from. If we are not fallen creatures, but simply creatures, we cannot be redeemed. If we are not deluded by the wish for immortality, transience doesn't diminish us...If mortality were a flaw or a punishment, we were always verging on humiliation. Tyrannical fantasies of our own perfectibility still lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become an excuse for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals -- complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love -- are lives experienced as continuous failure.
Adams Phillips, Darwin's Worms
living on $60 a week is liberating.
ReplyDeleteThe antithetic book hall echos at
ReplyDeleteThe hot hit hook, absence all tacit
In the teachable kitsch, so loath to
Thank the aesthetic oilcloth boa
All thickish at the beacon, the too
Satanic bolo tie, the hot chalk, the
Heathenish thicket, all to boo cat
The blanks I hoot, chaotic athlete
That the hole in the boat is a clock