Anna B
@annabwriting
Anna B
@annabwriting
It’s political and it’s cultural: At some point in the last few years, a feeling has set in that the future is being foreclosed
truth is a problem now for everyone, if the idea seems empty or useless in ‘the era of social media’, ‘science denialism’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and suchlike, maybe that just means that ‘everyone’ has caught up to where philosophy was in 1922.
“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."
-Susan Sontag
Plato’s truth is identical not only with the beautiful, but with the good and the just.
One might have hoped to turn to philosophy for a clarification of the nature of truth, and maybe even a celebration of it. But philosophy of pragmatist, analytic and continental varieties lurched into the post-truth era a century ago.
So what would a prose literature devoted to illness sound like? Perhaps it could only exist in the form of the essay, of which genre Woolf’s opening sentence is both an elegant part-for-whole and a less than obvious parody.
When, in the 1970s, the Sex Pistols sang “There is no future,” there was at least a confrontational relish to it. Now there’s just dread.
Seven times—four hows and three whats —the sentence invites us to anticipate a logically and artistically satisfying terminus