Facebook divide

Some who feel that every time they log on to fb something's being taken from them; others who feel this apprehension couldn't be further from ridiculous.

DayOne entry, Jul 25, 2011

Not doing enough when someone dies. Like not sending them off with food or clothing for a trip. Feeling appalled at how life goes on, heedless, impiously. Feeling ashamed and scrawny in my tennis whites, pampered and undeserving, as I looked at Mr. Ligget's downy translucent ears. They lived in the home of James Monroe, and we visited them dressed up at Xmas in revolutionary war garb. I thought they were ancient and from that time. No concept of time, just as I thought the mediaeval players at Elm Court meant that that place too hearkened back to that era. And I in the present, with all I'd been given, spoiled, with nothing heroic about me. Strange, the degree of shame and nervousness and inadequacy I felt toward so much growing up. Wonder how that has transmuted these days, if at all...

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In age

She was just become gloss
From a matte finish

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two guys batting around literary allusions around a third (woman?)

literary monkey in the middle

clumsy new writer

makes jokes not convincingly about things he takes seriously

novels bring back the time when

we could be most exalted by the practice of perfecting ourselves. But in this world today, perfecting yourself is navel-gazing. Any kind of self-attention is attention away from a world that's coming apart. The impulse to do something about the state of the world seems to make one a candidate for sacrifice in belittlement. the self-perfecting somehow doesn't apply, although morally you think it would. there's a kind of grey annihilation of the self--which I guess could be ennobled by considering in the Buddhist context, but to agitate against inequity, destruction of resources, inhumanity to others, these seem just fatiguing and demolishing and degrading of the self, unless I suppose you learn the art of participating in them exuberantly, artfully. that may be the only successful adaptation to learn.

Bertrand Russel's enjoining to lead a life motivated by love and guided by knowledge, or something like that, would be the touchstone idea, which, if never lost sight of, might make for the life well-lived, and artfully...

The people trying to hold the line on this world

To hold the center
To not want it over so soon
And those who shruggingly do what
Humans are designed to do, be charming and excellent
And creative and arch and witty, and can't deign
To see who prepares that ground
For it is beneath one.

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incapacity to process loss of a friend - therefore anger