Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 12/7/21
What idea could flow across the whole of American society? A gospel is the variety of literary work that seems suited to the task. Deep as my regard of Proust runs, a contemporary iteration of Proust, wherein the writer describes the minutia of being that leads, through persons and aesthetic entities, into an inexhaustible map of self, would not only flounder but also, more likely than not, fail to meet resistance. It would operate at a level where its forces could not act on bodies. The more robust forms of a gospel, one wherein the lesson is broad, and is therefore instructive to those that care little about its minutia, is a form that is likelier to be despised and loved in a measure that would make it forcefulness effectual.
My generation was in deep need of a great moment. Our failure to produce one in a timely manner has set the next generation on a poor footing. A great moment is not the foundation of a company, nor the release of a product, but they are best expressed in the form of an aesthetic accomplishment. The alternative to an aesthetic moment, that is to say entertainment, is much preferred by our society’s entrenched centers of authority, whether it is overtly or implicitly preferred, because an aesthetic object resolves deep needs, the likes of which entertainment has been meticulously organizing the outer-most portions of the individual to resist. Worse still are the unearned revelations that will be the hallmark of the generation to come.
What could be more entertaining than the idea that through no effort one has become an outlier in the scale and character of one’s enlightenment? Without an appreciation for the aesthetic object, it would seem that there is nothing valuable, nothing, too, to be gained, that is derived through the application of one’s limited attention to any entity besides the internet, the machine that more and more reliably produces the experience of unearned epiphany. Only bad actors succumb to this stimulus, or else they become bad actors through this process. All discourse has become incumbent upon these trifling fancies. All discourse therefore becomes impossible, and it only seems practical to continue to consume the unearned epiphanies curated just for you. This is in part the failure of my generation to pick up after itself. To write is to take up the broom that the Bhudda passed for thousands of years, wondering each time he did so who in God’s name would tidy the detritus in the immediate vicinity of the broom. Reading is the process of coming to earn one’s epiphanies.
