Sublime

Jean Varda.

For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out.

Freud, as we shall see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called “reductionism,” a curious need to put down human culture and intelligence by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces.

Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward—whether

doing the Japanese and I the English, with background improvisations by Vincent Delgado on the koto and shakuhachi.

symbols of pleasure—attractively packaged but inferior in content.

“…the stammerings of an old man who does not seem to have achieved a full psychic victory over an awkward adolescence…”

Zen philosopher Alan Watts argued that “the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing,” and that “we look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. We want the protection of being ‘exclusive’ and ‘special.’”⁠7 This was exactly what I was looking for.

taboo—our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are.