The New Romantics

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more

The only antidote I've found to the madness of my own brain is to talk to other people and be around other people. Somehow, through conversation and through seeing and being seen, I feel less terrible. I wouldn't say I feel great neccessarily, I just feel less bad.

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: if you have had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to... See more

“Your homework is to stop canceling each other, find out about punk, and get laidwhile you’re at it,” I told them. “Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems. And it’s still happening right now, all over the world.” MAGA has adopted an authoritarian style of punk that disdains what... See more

atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element