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Editor of Logos, an online journal of society and culture.
Lives in New Jersey.
Won't eat frozen vegetables.
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Tuesday, January 20
It is so strange to take a more unconventional look at the people around you sometimes. It is so strange to see how many of them are lonely, frustrated, resigned, at times desperate. There is a sense that these emotions are not always at the forefront of who they are--hence they are very subtle and easily missed when we speak to our collegues, friends, and others that we know. Rather, they set the tenor of their lives; they characterize the things they confess to themselves;what they think of when they're going home on the train after work, or in those fleeting moments of contemplation.
Sometimes they stir to the surface, as when some crisis point occurs in their everyday existence. If it is true that we occupy the end of history (I mean Hegel here, not Fukuyama) then it is possible that our culture may never recover from this phenomenon. It may be that this is the fate of our once-productive and expressive western culture: to diminish in the light of prosperity and the fading light of an exhausted humanism.
Michael was existentially meandering at 9:15 AM \\
Thursday, January 15
I was having a discussion last evening with someone and the subject of books arose. As I thought about it, I realized that I know books in ways that few others seem to. I do not mean that I necessarily know more books than others, but that when I think of books or I read them, I find myself so intimately connected to them.
Books liberated me. They freed me from the class-based ignorance of my upbringing and they helped form me in moral and aesthetic ways. I love books not for symbolic reasons, and not only because of their content. Physically they are wonderful objects. Beyond the neophyte's love of the olfactory attributes of older (or newer) paper and different grades of glues, the feel of different kinds of paper, their textures provide me with endless pleasure. The many kinds of fonts--some with sensual curvy lines for x's and y's and others more stern and angular in their k's and w's--are a pleasure for the eyes. Older books that I own--especially the old French volumes of Corneille and Racine--still have indentations for each letter impressed from those older modes of printing.
To overcome all of these little pleasures is one thing, to discuss content, that is quite another. Perhaps more on that some other time.
Michael was existentially meandering at 9:24 AM \\
Friday, January 2
It is perhaps one of the most perennial of questions that man has ever asked himself: why is that women are so difficult to understand? I have to say that I am utterly unconvinced by the argument that there simply some gulf between men and women that make them unable--or largely unable--to truly understand one another. I am well aware of the semantic and anthropological distinction between "sex" and "gender"--that one is biological and the other socially constructed--but I fail to see the profundity behind such a dichotomy.
No, I am more convinced that women operate at a very different frequency than men because of a complex mix of biological, social and psychological reasons. That these different aspects conspire to make women more prone to irrationalism under certain circumstances and therefore less comprehensible by men. This would seem on the surface to be nothing more than mysoginistic banter wrapped in pseudo-rationalistic prose. I beg to differ, in the most extreme way.
First, biologically women have a whole complex of chemicals coursing through their bloodstream, all of which are impossible to calculate in terms of their exact amounts--their blood concentration levels are dynamic, and thus are their effects--and which differ from woman to woman. This is nothing on its own, or, it could be a defining variable in a woman's behavior. Women are therefore more sensitive to their biological limitations in terms of having children and the like. Yes, this is well known and hardly anything new but there are other elements, too.
Next, there are psychological and social elements. These cannot be underplayed. The subordination of women to men begins with the family, itself a product of female subordination to men historically and throughout the development of civilization. Now, this subordination--however thinly veiled it may in fact be--creates a very different view of the world for women. Each personality will deal with this in a different way and it gives rise to the plurality of female personality types that we know from the slut to the airhead to the uptight.
Now, why is there such a disconnect between men and women? I think men lack these elements for various reasons--those that do not to a greater or lesser degree have their own issues--and therefore see the world in more basic, logical and rational ways. Women tend to be more prone to outbursts of irrational emotion and require emotional support more than men because they are less likely to think themselves out of a situation.
Women are therefore the most complex of creatures in a man's eye. They fascinate me with their twisted "logic"; with their odd views; and with their outbursts of frustrated emotion. They are so deeply needy and express/hide it in the most multifarious of ways. They are deeply aware of their condition and feelings and therefore become self-conscious about it, and then insecure when exposed. Of course, this means they can complicate the lives of men in emotional terms, but then again, men tend to do their own share of harm. But not all of us do (I certainly do not) so it is difficult to explain it away as mere revenge on the male side of our corrupt race.
All this would point to the superiority of men over women. I am not so sure how far that can be taken, but I would say that the ability for men to concentrate for long periods of time--and therefore create the masterpieces of art and science that we know--is the result of being unencumbered by those things that plague women. I say plague because they are things that they are born into; it is a condition. Suffice it to say that reasoned analysis will support my broad claims here and that those men that constantly wonder to themselves, thanks to some ridiculous argument or another with their girlfriend or wife, why they are unable to get their point across, be listened to, or to let reason get the upper hand, should take heed that this is nothing more than another aspect of the human condition: the predicament that we all find ourselves, the solution to which constantly exceeds our reach.
Michael was existentially meandering at 1:34 PM \\
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