We Learn Nothing

I wonder whether this same fear isn’t beneath our twenty-first-century intolerance for waits and downtime and silence. It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming. So instead we keep ourselves perpetually stunned with stimuli, thereby missing out on the very thing we’re so scared of losing. Sterne’s stairway is a perfect metaphor for all those tedious interstitial moments we can’t wait to get through that make up most of our lives; we don’t even think of stairways as places in themselves, only as a means to get somewhere else.

After that, throughout my teen years, we traded book recommendations, like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a subtler comedy than Return of the Pink Panther but not entirely dissimilar; there are jokes about sodomy and halitosis in Pale Fire, and its fictitious annotator, Charles Kinbote, is no less clueless or deluded of his own greatness than Messrs. Clouseau and Le Pew.

But there’s something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they’re immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck’s sake defense. (Think of hard-core libertarians carefully explaining to you why the fire department should be privatized or heroin should be legal or everyone should be allowed to have automatic weapons.) As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, “An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness.”