Surrender

It seems that a large portion of these blog posts is devoted to the lamentation of my own ineptitude, and this mass of text is no exception. The only novelty is that I now know the root, the black root, of my inarticulacy. I no longer wish to write, I wish to be a writer. I want solitude, reclusion, the life of a writer. I cannot sincerely tell myself that I want to produce beauty. This is the peculiar tragedy of modernity: we want instantaneous pleasure, shallow competence, a simulacrum of the thing itself. It is a precarious tangle of desire - were we to apprehend the content, the precondition, for that which we desire, the desire would collapse instantly. The very fact that one pines for fame is the surest mark that one does not warrant it (if indeed anything warrants the gross excess of 'celebrity'). Today we want to have fame in the way that we might have a refrigerator. The idea that we cannot touch and trample everything is an inexorcisable woe.

My incarceration at university has mercifully expired, and what follows will undoubtedly take the form of something far worse. My unsuitability to absolutely any job is such that I see nothing ahead but death and decay. This is not hyperbole: I have spent much of the past year reasoning that taking a 'proactive approach' to the problem of employment was unwise because I would simply be dead beyond university. It has therefore come as rather a shock that I am alive, terribly alive.

People - fools - often console me, 'I think it will all turn out fine for you, you will get a good job in the end,' entirely misinterpreting every monad of my constitution. My fear is precisely this life of respectability, mediocrity, banality. That everything should fall beneath a sea of petty feuds, dull competition, the ache of unimportance. What monster can devote his life to tax returns, bureaucracy, accountancy and such without recourse to suicide? It seems to me that this is entirely preferable to a life of slow despair, a life in which one's powers - whate'er they be - are turned on their host. Depleted by one's own life force, set on by the parasite of one's idealism, this is the most painful suicide of all. And the greatest man builds the most exquisite cage.