All Things Are Too Small

The whole aesthetic economy is being rapidly altered, and what will replace it? Aside from glib tailored entertainments—that is, works that placate the surface itch without making us confront the deeper needs and purposes. This is an enormously important question: Can we live without addressing those?

To live entirely for oneself in private is a huge luxury, a luxury countless aspects of this society encourage, but like a diet of pure foie gras it clogs and narrows the arteries of the heart. This is what we’re encouraged to crave in this country, but most of us crave more deeply something with more grit, more substance.

“But where is the part of it which it does not itself contain?”

Against the encroachment of nothingness, we fill our lives with stuff. Against the ultimate negation, we strive for success. Against the hard information that we came from nothing and end there as well, against the resulting suspicion that we might, in fact, be nothing all the while, we struggle mightily to construct an identity, but we’re never qu