Arendt and DFW: On growing up.
Growing up and facing the world is a very specific experience. Few can take it seamlessly and if you are like me, it is always new. Every time I have taken up a new project I have to build my system from the bottom. It is terrifying and liberating at the same time.
Arendt has an essay called "Crisis in eduction" where the crisis is really the way in which new entities are introduced in the world while the old recedes. The old and new must have a definitive relationship, one that implies that the way things are, are renewed and at the same time changed for better. The essay discusses the concept of 'responsibility' for the world: a way of being in the world where you are concerned about where things are headed. A generation which has forgone this responsibility brings into the world a people who are no longer capable of finding a home here. (I bet there are many ways in which one can pretend one is at home, buying things at length might be one of them?)
David Foster Wallace's essay on Kafka deals with the issue of adolescence. He claims that our (America's) present culture is, developmentally and historically, adolescent. What he means is that the culture is anxious of the serious adult stuff that one is supposed to think about. The distinction between the old and new should be that the former not only knows about this serious stuff but is willing to communicate (or hold hands) with the latter and lead them into these uncomfortable truths. Taxes, death, loss of love are all part of this basket.
But to think about the serious stuff is not as bad as it is made to sound like. It means you sit quietly in a place and think yes, this is what is going on.
To sit quietly and think about what is going on is a task that is
- Excrutiatingly difficult in this professional situation that I am in (graduate school).
- All the more important because, the central thing, to avoid the emptiness one feels as a person when one is only going through the motions.
I learn I should take breaks, even from packed evenings to just sit, take a walk, let my mind wander a bit.
I learn that the way we organise our lives is a lot up to us, and not just a deterministic ordeal. Life happens to us, when we act on things.