Jensenacklesmishacollins:

I frequently hear the same yearning expressed in my consulting room – the wish for the world to disappear, for a cessation of any feelings, whether positive or negative, that intrude on the patient’s peace, alongside the painful awareness that the world’s demands are waiting on the way out. You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.

Josh Cohen

I think, today's irony ends up saying: 'How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.' Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig.

David Foster Wallace

Let me introduce a pair of rather less admirable siblings in the relativist family. The first of these is the familiar "freshman relativist," who urges that all opinions and actions are equally good and should be equally tolerated. He has two mantras: "Who's to say?" and "That's just your opinion." The other sibling is less amiable. Instead of a grin, he wears a sneer. He takes himself to have seen through or debunked the claims of others. So when we use words like truth, reason, objectivity, justice, fairness, or progress, we may think we are putting on robes of state, dignities that with luck we have earned and come to deserve, by doing our thinking properly. But to this sibling we are doing nothing but putting on tawdry theatrical props, disguises, and masks - and what is disguised is a Pandora's box of ugly things like persuasion, rhetoric, self-deception, and ultimately power and force. So where the previous sibling was tolerant and vacant, this sibling is destructive and bitter. Standing on the shoulders of modern thinkers, he tries to crush them under the weight of contempt. But this sibling is equally obnoxious. He is oblivious to his own intellectual limitations and laziness. He could not describe a transistor, let alone make one, but he will use computers and faxes and mobile phones full of them to spread the message that "transistor" is just a construct of Western bourgeois culture. Where the freshman relativist was promiscuously vacant, this relativist is promiscuously suspicious. - We still have to make judgments and act in the light of them. We just have to make sure that we do so as well as we can. Once we have to make up our minds about something, the issue is the issue. The other siblings duck issues, either retreating to an ironic, playful, aesthetic detachment from the business of life, or substituting allegiance to a realpolitik of naked force. ...They shy away from convictions and causes altogether. They suppose they have seen through the whole business of taking issues at face value. They say that we should not and cannot judge whether Tolstoy is a more interesting writer than Stephen King, or whether there was ever a Holocaust, or whether a religion that enjoins slaughtering the infidel is worse than one which does not. Expressions of opinion on such matters would be bad form: politically incorrect, disguises for colonialism, liberal hegemony, dominations of gender, and so on. It is this paralysis of judgment that the commentators lament. You cannot drive down the freeway with a mind vacant of opinion on where the traffic is and how fast it is going.

Simon Blackburn Relativism's Ugly Siblings

Richard Doyle (1824-1883) 

Pursued by elves

YAMAMOTO Keisuke（山本桂右 Japanese, b.1961）

1. Light Time Silence #30   2. Light Time Silence #31   3. Light Time Silence #32   Lithograph   via    more

A Moment of Respite by andy kehoe on Flickr.

vesi on Flickr.

There are three opponents in wrestling — the self, the other wrestler, and time. In wrestling, you are judged for your activity. How aggressively are you seeking out your opponent? How much time are you spending in a submissive position? Are you trying to get out of that position? In poetry, simply scribbling does not move the score. Eyeing the subject, circling about it, and getting ready to surge forward will not put the poem in your grasp. Busyness doesn't move the judge. Simply scribbling, biding your time, reading, is seen as idleness to the non-writer. To the writer, it is a flurry of activity. The trouble, then, is that writing a long poem suffuses idleness and activity over a sustained period. Nothing happens. Everything happens

Oliver de la Paz Six Minutes and Onward: Wrestling, Long Poems, and Time