The pattern standing out to me today in the entries at Philosophy & Literature is the failure of labels.
I want easy political labels and I'm frustrated when I they get fuzzy. Yikes -- I need to consider issues and who the major views are attached to, and try to discern patterns and draw connections among them, in order to decide how to vote, what to buy, and how else to live my life. That's way complicated. (Whew, at least it's obvious to me who not to vote for.)
The short hagiography of Paul Theroux (and desultory review of 'Dark Star Safari') says
You can sympathise with the strangers who have wandered across his path in the course of his travels and been pinned to the page, like broken butterflies, with a sardonically turned phrase. You would not want that to happen to you.Aw, c'mon. If I saw something familiar, I might laugh. If it drilled to the obvious faults I'm blinded to, I'd thank him. But at best it'd probably be clever bumper-sticker labeling, and I'd need to continue the hard work of living through the human subtleties we all work to discover.
But Mr. Theroux makes me work too. The guy who drives a luxury SUV says this about a certain stage in his African journey (sans SUV)
'In general on this trip, I didn't care whether it ever ended. I just felt, I'm going to head south for as long as it takes and I mustn't be impatient, because if I'm impatient I'm going to be angry and I'm going to blame people. So time went out the window. And that way I was able to enjoy living in the moment.'... a reminder not to carry my loathing of the vehicle over to the whole person. [Which reminds me of a post I've been wanting to do about my car -- a really shallow subject, but maybe it can be mined. And yeah, it's shallow of me to be caught up in a visceral reaction against a certain configuration of iron and rubber.]
And then there's... whoops, I'm now reading the rest of the articles with an eye to slapping the label "failure of labels" on them.
October 18, 2002 09:36 AM