#scridditcher

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

sometimes i wonder if people who talk about how they’ve grown up without just-world hypothesis (”everything happens for a reason” &c.), aren’t too broken up about its absence, have a hard time imagining how the loss of it could have been so earth-shattering to previous generations--sometimes i wonder if they’re just wrong

disclaimer, no i do not seriously believe this, yes i know that Everyone Is Different, i’m just griping about my own experience. with that said,

my mom’s agnostic and my dad’s an atheist. i never consciously believed “everything happens for a reason,” and as a kid i scoffed at people who said stuff like that. god sounded fake, soulmates sounded fake, hell the whole idea of having a “purpose in life” sounded fake. if i’d heard the term “optimistic nihilism” at the time i would likely have said it described my worldview perfectly

and then i got permasick, while still recovering from past trauma--and also trump got elected, but that was just the last coffin-nail--and i discovered i hadn’t had the slightest whiff up to that point of what “life’s not fair” and “not everything happens for a reason” and “the universe is chaotic neutral and doesn’t give two shits about the fate of humanity” mean, and was now being forced to eat it raw. and it was unbelievably bitter and i don’t think i’ll ever get it all down. in 2017 i rarely thought about anything but “nothing means anything”

here’s an easy example to illustrate this change in mentality: in 2014 i read Nausea for the first time, because the idea of depression as a kind of existential emetophobia intrigued me. i loved the (translated) prose, but found the thesis bathetic--so obvious that it felt trite and rushed.* and then between 2016 and 2018 i reread it so many times i had chunks of it practically memorized, because its main character also can’t stop thinking about how nothing means anything, and i desperately needed the intellectual company of other people who found this upsetting

so when people much older and better-informed than i am talk about living self-consciously meaningless lives like it’s no big deal i’m like... are you somehow so much smarter than me that your ability to assimilate concepts i can hardly fit my mouth around extends out of the intellectual realm and into the emotional one? or have you been sprinkling existential green-can parmesan on your food this whole time while i choke down gorgonzola? because now when people say “optimistic nihilism!” like that solves everything i kind of want to throw all the messiest and worst-smelling cheese i can find at their heads

*which is a totally fair criticism, and remains my estimate. as an advertisement for sartre’s worldview i don’t find this book satisfying at all. but it’s precious to me, so please never insult it where i can hear you, lmao

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

maccruiskeen stims by playing a musical instrument whose notes are too high for anyone else to hear god he’s autistic how did i not notice before

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

magic mountaining again

“This third letter was comprehensive, it did the job—not in terms of conceptions of time valid down below, but in terms of those prevailing up here. It established Hans Castorp’s freedom. This was the word he used, not explicitly, not by forming the syllables in his mind, but as something he felt in its most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which he had learned to understand it during his stay here—though that was a sense that had little to do with the meaning Settembrini attached to the word. And as he heaved a sigh, his chest quivered as the wave of terror and excitement that he knew quite well by now swept over him.” (221-2)

whyyyyy god why

“Blood had rushed to his head as he wrote, his cheeks burned. He picked up Mercury from the nightstand and took his temperature, as if he could not let this opportunity pass. Mercury climbed to one hundred degrees.

“‘You see?’ Hans Castorp thought. And he added a postscript: ‘This letter has been quite an effort. ... You will have to excuse me if I do not write often.’”

WHY, GOD, WHY

“Then he lay back and lifted a hand to the sky, palm out, just as he had held it behind the fluorescent screen. But daylight had no effect on its living form, the stuff of it grew even darker and more opaque against the brightness and just its outer edge shone reddish. It was the living hand he was accustomed to seeing, washing, using—not the alien scaffold he had seen in the screen. The analytical pit he had seen open up before him that day had closed again.” (222)

...lucky bastard

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

hey! note to self!! preemptive reminder that your habits are not on trial here and that noticing a symptom exists=/=overreacting to it

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

despair and illness as forms of depravity bad posture and mildly inconsiderate habits (“carelessness” hh if madame chauchat isn’t ND i don’t know what) as unfitness for life the emotions of a feverish person as a kind of Unnatural Vice, as different from and inferior to normal-person emotions as infatuation is from committed love, jesus, the magic mountain is amazing but when i read it i feel like saniette at the verdurins’.* constantly begging it not to hurt me. i just?? what are even my options here. i can insist my thoughts and emotions are just as real and good as a healthy person’s; or, i can accept the traditional view that they’re not, and go back to trying to cultivate sobriety? which made me MISERABLE it made me HATE my self and life i... noooooo hell no i’m not going back to 2017. but isn’t there some middle ground or third option i can land on? ok so my life my thoughts and feelings and habits are notional, impulsive, depraved, not real—ok, but. there must be something else???

*in proust. “Saniette was delighted to see the conversation take so animated a turn. Since Brichot was talking all the time, he himself could preserve a silence which would save him from being the butt of M. and Mme Verdurin’s wit. And growing even more sensitive in his joy and relief, he had been touched when he heard M. Verdurin ... tell the butler to put a jug of water in front of him since he never drank anything else. ... Moreover, Mme Verdurin had actually smiled at him once. Decidedly they were kind people. He was not going to be tortured any more.” (4.446)

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

just so we’re clear: i don’t lack the subtlety to perceive that hans castorp feels vaguely satisfied by this proof that writing the letter (which he didn’t want to do) has cost him a BUE. i can tell we’re doin an “invalidism as pretext for leisure” angle here, and that does scare me. does make me uncomfortable. it doesn’t offend me, since i don’t rly do anger, but i do suspect it should?? but the reason i’m whygodwhying at it is i recognize that vindication. i can still remember feeling warped gratitude toward my own debility just for proving what i already knew. and tbh i have no idea if it’s had a negative material effect on me but now that i’ve lost that it feels like an Old Folly w/ which i’ve doomed myself

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

i’m reading the magic mountain, because to susan sontag’s description of it as a Highly Problematic depiction of illness my internal reply was basically, “wow, this book sounds ingenious and fascinating and like i’ll find it deeply personally offensive.” 

anyway, i’m only 35 pages in but. so far i’m just in love w/ the prose, annnnnd fascinated but sort of also terrified by how much the main character (morally) resembles my self of ca. 2014. the only thing that offends me so far is the blurb. (but i almost always hate blurbs.)

In The Magic Mountain, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.

ugh! surely there’s more to it than that?? these beautiful details these amazing insights. “european society is terminally irrational” oh absolutely, but. please?? please. illness is no more irrational than any other natural phenomenon. i don’t act against my own interests and neither does my body; it’s just harder for us than for most to act in their favor. please mann give me better advice or a better verdict than stop defeating yourself. i mean, i know you won’t, but. please?

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

“Well, I’m not going to lie out on my balcony at night in any case,” Hans Castorp declared. “I won’t do that, let me tell you. That would seem really too strange. Everything has its limits. And there has to be some way for me to tell that I’m only a visitor up here among you all.”

SOME WAY BESIDES THE FACT the doctors skip him on their rounds

“I’ll sit here for a while yet and smoke my cigar, just as usual. It tastes terrible, but I know that it’s good and that will have to suffice for me today. It’s almost nine o’clock—well, not quite nine yet, sad to say. But once it’s half past, that will be late enough for me to go to bed at something like a normal time.”

He felt a chill and shivered—first once, then several times. Hans Castorp leapt up and ran over to the wall thermometer as if hoping to catch it flagrante delicto. It read fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit. … He muttered something incoherent, rambling on to the effect that even if it was August, it would be no disgrace to heat the place, because it wasn’t a matter of the month, but of the temperature, and right now it was so low that he was freezing to death. But his face was burning. He sat back down, then stood up again, muttered a request to use the blanket from Joachim’s bed, spread it over his legs, and went back to sitting—flushed, chilled, and tormenting himself with the disgusting taste of his cigar. A wave of misery swept over him—it seemed as if he had never felt this miserable in all his life. (86)

wait so then--it’s not just me???? holy shit. holy shit

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

ok, i’m back. so anyway, here’s why. (fair warning, this gets way morbid under the thing and kinda purple too.)

“She was just a young girl, so it is excusable, after all. But even grown men carry on like that sometimes, which is, of course, inexcusably weak-willed of them. Behrens knows how to deal with them, he can strike just the right tone for such cases.”

“What sort of tone?” Hans Castorp asked with a scowl.

“’Don’t make such a fuss!’ he says,” Joachim replied. “At least that’s what he said to one fellow recently…. He was one of those types who makes a dreadful scene right at the end and absolutely refuses to die. And so Behrens simply dressed him down: ‘Would you please not make such a fuss,’ he said, and the patient quieted down at once and died quite peaceably.”

Hans Castorp slapped his thigh with one hand, threw himself back against the bench, and stared at the sky.

“Listen here, that’s weighty stuff,” he cried. “Snaps his head off and says, ‘Don’t make such a fuss!’ To a dying man. Weighty stuff. A dying man deserves a certain amount of respect. You can’t just walk up to him so calm and cool and…. There’s something holy about a dying man, as it were—in my opinion.”

“I won’t deny that,” Joachim said. “But if he starts carrying on in such a weak-willed way…”

“No,” Hans Castorp insisted with a ferocity not at all appropriate to the mild objection Joachim had offered. “I’ll not let you talk me out of it. A dying man has something nobler about him than your average rascal strolling about, laughing and making money and stuffing his belly. It won’t do.” (53-4)

i forgot!!! i forgot that normalcy comes with this kind of willingness to judge, this inability not to judge. and ggggod help me, i’m already a little like joachim about this too. i mean, i remain solemn in the presence of death (last time i checked anyway), but. have to resist the urge to label it unseemly when i hear an otherwise-healthy injured person complain about being unable to walk comfortably to the mailbox. 

“But if he starts carrying on in such a weak-willed way” joachim says--as if by not wanting to die you could spoil the dignity of the occasion. when my dad’s mom was unconscious, a few hours before she died, one of her doctors told us that the day before she’d still been lively, stern, angry, demanding help. i could tell this description was half confessional and half apologetic, trying to put a braver spin on what was probably more like begging for mercy, but ever since i got used to this memory i’ve been glad it happened. she seemed to spend so much of her last few months w/ this kind of smoldering resignation, angry but too tired or too timid to act on that anger. and i know it’s not the doctors’ fault she died (tho i do think some of them neglected her, and that that encouraged her defeatism), so it sucks how often they receive the brunt of dying people’s anger, but. no way? it’s not cowardly to admit when you’re terrified. imo it’s so much braver to scream and cry and “fuss” than to go out all meekly just so the living won’t come away quite so afraid of death. 

notice joachim pities the girl whose fear of death he actually witnessed--only despises it when he can easily remove himself from the scene. and mann is right that this kind of contempt is all about ascribing more to the will than is fair, should be>is because you’re trying too hard to control yourself hhggh thank you thank you thomas mann i’m sorry i underestimated you

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

...I CHOOSE TO TAKE THIS AS good (rather than worrying) news; thank you

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

“All I was trying to say is that it’s bizarre and upsetting when the body goes off on its own accord, living with no connection to one’s soul and putting on airs—like a heart pounding for no purpose whatever. One literally searches for some reason for it, some emotional stimulus, a feeling of joy or fear, that could justify it, so to speak—at least that’s how it is with me, I can only speak for myself.”

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

good to know it comes so highly recommended! i’m pretty starry-eyed about it so far. just, also scared, because i’m real tired of loving books that refuse to love me back

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

like, i know this complaint is decades old already, but, god i’m so tired of living on the wrong side of the metaphor

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

i’m reading jane eyre; i’ve been warned plenty of times that the bit about rochester’s secret wife is Highly Problematic, but mostly what i’ve heard people say is that it’s a. very very racist, and b. also, incidentally, perhaps too obviously to mention,* rooted in a sexist idea of how marriage works and what an ideal wife should be. and, like, yeah! it’s both those things, but, also, uhhhh?

“My bride’s mother I had never seen; I understood she was dead. The honey-moon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too, a complete dumb idiot. The elder [brother] ... will probably be in the same state one day. My father and brother, Russell, knew all this, but they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined [her family] in the plot against me [i.e., to persuade him to marry her]. ... I found her nature wholly alien to mine, ... her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher ... that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile.... [Her] character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank; they were so strong, only cruelty could check them; and I would not use cruelty. [gee, what a martyr. /s] What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses these propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate [n.b. in victorian this word connotes alcoholism] and unchaste. ... I was rich enough now, yet poor to hideous indigence; a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings; for the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity.”

it is so intensely and overtly ableist and no one told me it would be!! which like... it’s fine. whatever. i’m hard to trigger; the way rochester and jane eyre talk about bertha mason’s mental illness pisses me off, but i was ready to be pissed off so that in itself is fine. i’ve seen this kind of thing too many times for it to wound me i think. but i am really fucking tired of the thing where we treat all other forms of bigotry like they’re downwind of racism and/or misogyny. it’s like when people say that “hysteria” is a word we used to use for women who didn’t behave, because medical abuse of actually-sick people is a less Empowering history to hear about and apparently that makes it less important. these characters’ racist othering of and contempt for bertha mason doesn’t become less real when you acknowledge that they justify this by appealing to her mental illness, ok? racism and sexism against disabled people are still bad!!! i promise

*this is me trying to imitate the casualness w/ which i’ve heard lecturers on jane eyre mention its sexism; i don’t mean to second the notion it’s not important, though i do kind of empathize w/ their apathy since like. if you’ve read any victorian novel before then you do kinda know what to expect

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

i’m in love with this book