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Aug. 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:00
373 A Short Story Analysis

An example of an artist gently coaxing his culture to step off a cliff

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Hello, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's twenty past eleven on Friday, the 18th of August, 2006.
And you can enjoy the very first Beachcast, which is I'm sitting here with Christina.
She's doing her crossword. And she said to me, Steph, she turned and she said, I'd really like to rest, maybe have a nap, but I'm having trouble falling asleep.
Is there any chance that you could do a podcast to help me take that one-way ticket to Slumberland that you so generously provide when we're podcasting?
And last night when I was doing the videocast, and I'm not doing a videocast out here at the beach, of course, because it's tough to get the computer out here and the webcam, and there's no power and blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, so I'm just working off my Zen Vision M. But last night when I was doing the videocast, I wanted to turn and check something with Christina who'd fallen asleep.
As I was murmuring Wei Wei in the creepy darkness lighting to ask her something and she'd fallen asleep.
And I resisted the urge to turn the webcam and just to show the kind of power that I have as a speaker.
The kind of fundamental, elemental energy that flows out of me as a speaker.
That, unfortunately, is so much energy that it short-circuits Christina's entire neuropsychological system and puts her very close to a coma, from which she recovers about seven or eight hours later feeling very refreshed.
So I can't really blame her, but I try.
So I hope that you're enjoying the sounds.
We're up here at the Severn Lodge in Muskoka, which is having beautiful, beautiful weather.
And after a very active day yesterday, we're going to go just flopping on the beach for a little while, and then we're going to play some beach volleyball, and we're going to go mountain biking, and then we're going to go horseback riding.
And I weigh about twice what Christina weighs because she is about 38 pounds and wet with gel and with divers' weights.
And so, as we both come strolling up to the horses, I can't wait to imagine what it's going to be like in one or the other of the horses' minds as they look back.
And if they had hooves that they could cross their fingers on, they would do that, saying, Give me the woman!
Give me the woman! Don't give me the 210-pound guy.
Give me the 105-pound woman.
But we'll see how that goes this afternoon.
Now, I wanted to read you a story which comes from...
It's a series in the Globe and Mail, which is a Canadian newspaper.
Somewhat equivalent to the New York Times, but even slightly more left.
It didn't used to be so lefty, but it kind of is now.
This is from Wednesday, August the 16th.
And they're running a series called Summer Fiction by a gentleman, written by a gentleman named Edward Ritchie.
This is part four or five. I haven't read any of the other stuff.
But I did want to talk about some of his writing.
Not because I don't want to pick on this guy or anything.
I mean, he's just your average writer.
But I think that it would be interesting just to have a look at his fiction, just so that you can see the kind of stuff that I'd like to talk about in terms of modern art.
And so I'm going to read you this short, short story, and then talk to you a little bit about what I think about this kind of art and why it's so popular.
So let's have a quick look at his resume.
This guy, Edward Riche, writes for Stage, Screen, and the Page in St.
John's, Newfoundland. His 2004 novel, The Nine Planets, won both the Thomas Radoll and the Winterset Awards for fiction.
So this is considered to be a relatively great fiction writer, I guess you could say.
So I'm going to read you this very short story, and then we'll have a chat about it, and I'll just sort of pass along some of my thoughts about what is going on in the artistic world, not just what, but I'd also like to say sort of why as well, why this is going on in the fiction world.
And I'll read it straight.
I'm not going to try and make any commentary on it while I'm reading it, but we'll have a chat about it afterwards.
So it starts like this. Oh, the story so far.
This is part four or five.
Dragging her heels on the way to her friend's cottage, Charlotte decided to take a lunch break in Lunenburg.
This is the start of the story.
Charlotte was seated in what must have once been the drawing room.
There was an enormous fireplace on the restaurant's rear wall.
She declined anything to drink but a glass of water.
The menu was interesting.
It was a more serious restaurant than she'd thought.
She decided on fresh mackerel with a tomato sauce.
Tomato sauce?
Accompanied by a beet salad only because it seemed so wrong, so out of a tin, that she reasoned to be offered alongside local scallops and lamb and haddock.
It must be special. The waitress commented on her choice with an enthusiasm Charlotte took to be genuine.
Two of four other tables were occupied, both by couples, one elderly, the other about her age.
Of this second couple, she could only see the face of the man with whom she made eye contact.
He tried to hold her gaze for a moment, as if he thought he knew her.
Charlotte concluded that this man must have been the one looking at her as she had stood by the entrance.
Charlotte knew that a woman dining alone always got unbidden attention, and it was not.
As one might expect from men who were themselves alone, that she most commonly drew looks.
The movie scene, the dashing gent who, with the sweeping gesture of a sturdy hand to the unoccupied chair opposite, said,"'Mind if I join you?' Never happened.
No, the glances came not from the men who were alone, but from those who were already in the company of another woman.
"'Were they?' Charlotte wondered.
"'Comparison shopping, measuring the woman they were with against her.' Even if they were seemingly content or in high spirit, smiling and garrulous at that moment, they couldn't help but wonder if they made the right choice in coming this far in life, be it a month or twelve years, with their Judy or Diane or Heather.
Some surely had regrets.
Did her ex-husband Terence look over Charlotte's shoulder one meal and see Nancy, the new wife?
The mackerel was spectacular.
It was grilled and the flesh was more delicate and moist than any fish she had ever tasted.
The sauce was of barely cooked fresh cherry tomatoes, bright acidity, making it more a sort of pickle.
The beet was in a tower with goat cheese mortar and rested in a pool of emerald oil volatile with basil.
The man at the other table watched her eat the meal like his head was invisibly tethered to her fork.
Charlotte could feel his gaze.
She wished to be left alone, and once finished, impatiently flagged the waitress with her credit card.
There was a stigma to eating by oneself, again, that whiff of desperation.
There was a tyranny of togetherness at the table.
Damn him, she thought of the man watching her, and out of sheer wickedness she looked back at him and smiled.
It confounded him as she thought it might, for they had never seen one another before.
They would likely never meet again.
She saw that with her response she had arrested his ability to attend to his companion, had made him think only of her, of Charlotte the stranger.
He was not handsome.
Pallor testified that he wasn't getting enough of all the sun out there, and yet he was squinting.
He had not yet accepted his receding hairline.
The woman he was with, from what Charlotte could see of her, could do better.
And to think that he sat there assaying Charlotte and her lonely lot, Charlotte had a mind to go over and give him a piece of her mind.
Eating by oneself without the shield of a book or magazine or newspaper, the one you were holding, if you like, forces you to think.
Solitude is contemplative.
Charlotte now supposed that lone wolves like herself came to have rich inner lives, then that...
Charlotte now supposed that lone wolves like herself came to have rich inner lives than the paired, the shackled.
They all thought they knew her, but of course they couldn't.
She knew what she would do.
She signed for her bill and then stood and walked towards them.
And that's the end of this excerpt of the short story.
To me, this is absolutely fascinating, really, when you think about it, and I'll just spend a few minutes talking about this kind of fiction, because it's very common.
When I took a series of writing classes at Humber College, Which is one of the better writing classes in Canada.
This was the kind of stuff that was just all over the place.
These tiny little vignettes of tiny little people living tiny little lives.
The inconsequential minutiae of their day.
The observations that lead nowhere.
The descriptions of food.
Which is a kind of like food porn, maybe aimed at women, I'm not sure.
But the tiny little nuances of every stream of consciousness about every inconsequential interaction.
This is so common in modern fiction.
Not so much in movies, but definitely in fiction.
And it's something that we barely even notice anymore.
Simply because this is a de rigueur for modern art.
And I find it almost physically repulsive.
And I'll talk about why.
Let's just have a quick breakdown of this story and have a chat about it.
So she decides to take lunch.
So this is a woman who's having lunch, right?
This is the drama.
Now this guy could have written about anything.
He could have written about a hero.
He could have written about somebody facing an intense moral challenge.
He could have written about somebody breaking a challenging relationship or breaking the family.
He could have written about space aliens.
He could have written about anything.
And what he chooses to spend his life's energies and creative juices on is a description of a woman having lunch.
And the only unusual thing that occurs in this woman having lunch is that a gentleman looks at her perhaps a little more than normal.
And this is the kind of gripping drama that you find not just in Canadian fiction but sort of in modern fiction.
You find either this sort of middle-aged sort of bland stuff Where everything is curious and quirky and a little different and everybody has wry observations and everybody is this and everybody is that.
And people also get irritable quite a bit in modern fiction, so you see that very much here as well.
And it really is...
I'll talk about why I find it in general so repulsive, but let's spend a few minutes on the story.
I think it'll be interesting. So, she's trying to decide what to have for lunch.
This is a moment of high drama in the story.
And she decides to have the mackerel, because she thinks that the tomato sauce would come out of a tin, and it's maybe not out of a tin, so maybe it'll be really good, because it just seems so unusual that it would be on this restaurant's menu, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
This is what this gentleman is spending a fair amount of his creative energies, and not just him.
I mean, you could write this sort of in your journal if you wanted as a snippet or a vignette.
But he's got it published, and it's been proofread, and it's not badly proofread, but it's been proofread and published in a national newspaper, gone out coast to coast, and of all of the stuff that they could look at as far as literature goes, they choose this kind of stuff.
She also has this feeling that a woman dining alone always gets unbidden attention.
And there's no sense about whether this is actually true, or whether this is just this woman's self-consciousness about eating alone.
Because that would be...
I mean, not that you could make this story very interesting, but that would be slightly more interesting.
If she feels that a woman always gets unbidden attention, but she doesn't actually, that would be interesting, because then it would be that she's imagining a social web around her that doesn't exist, and so on.
And that could be a little bit more interesting.
And if the men are looking at her, and she wonders if they're comparison shopping and all this and that, and in what a completely unimportant and bland thought to have, if I sort of had that thought, I'm not even sure I'd bother sharing it with Christina.
It's like, gee, I wonder if couples, when they're with each other, look at other couples and wonder if they could have done better and so on.
And there is, of course, something so fundamentally depressing about that very idea.
That you're sitting there with someone and looking out at somebody else and wondering if you could do better.
There's a dissociation, a loneliness, a complete lack of respect for your partner, and therefore for yourself.
And this is how this woman views relationships, that everybody's just out checking out other people to see if they could do better.
And then she has the best mackerel in the world, and it's very important that we talk about the kind of sources and a pool of emerald volatile with basil.
Now, the word volatile is a very powerful word.
It indicates very explosive personalities, very politically tense or militarily tense situations.
I'm not sure that it's particularly appropriate to use the word volatile in conjunction with a fairly mild spice added to a sauce.
It just seems like that might be a little bit of overkill, or the guy sort of reaching to try and find some sort of drama, you know, so that the most, actually the most gripping word in the entire short story The most powerful word is used in conjunction with Basel rather than any other sort of interaction.
I do very much like this sentence.
The man at the other table watched her eat the meal like his head was invisibly tethered to her fork.
Every time her fork goes up and down, he watches it.
It's a little creepy, and of course it is not very believable, because when you are sitting across the table from someone having lunch, if they're staring at somebody else, it's kind of hard not to notice that.
Right? So the fact that this man's companion, the man who's watching her, doesn't notice it is completely unbelievable.
I very much like the sentence because it's very visual and it really, really gets the whole picture.
But it's completely unbelievable that his partner is not at least going to turn around and see who he's looking at or sort of ask him to, like, what he's looking at and so on.
Because if you're trying to talk to someone and they're staring fixedly over your shoulder, their head bopping up and down as they stare at somebody else's fork, you're kind of going to notice that.
And, of course, if you don't, that's indicative of a pretty dysfunctional relationship, right?
Now, then...
She regards the stranger.
She regards this guy who's looking at her.
And she says, He was not handsome.
Paller testified that he wasn't getting enough of all that sun out there, and yet he was squinting.
He had not yet accepted his receding hairline.
The woman he was with, from what Charlotte could see of her, could do better.
Now, this again is a pretty horrendous statement to make about a romantic relationship because, I mean, we can assume it's a romantic relationship, but to say that a woman could do better because she might be able to find a man more physically attractive Is really,
really quite horrendous. You could, I think, legitimately say, if you could pull it off to be a believable scene, that a gentleman was staring at another woman and the other woman noticed it, the woman he was sitting with noticed it.
You could legitimately say, I think, and believably say, she could do better because she's having lunch with him and he's staring at another woman.
But that would be more likely to be the case if he was some sort of traditionally good-looking guy.
But to say that the woman could do better, not because the man is staring at another woman over lunch, but because he's got a receding hairline, is really, really, really pathetic.
And so what happens is her own vanity is stung, right?
We have no idea what this woman looks like or how old she is.
I get middle-aged, but I'm not positive.
And so, this woman, this man is not very physically handsome, and she says, and to think that he sat there assaying Charlotte and her lonely lot.
Charlotte had a mind to go over and give him a piece of her mind.
Now, this is fascinating as well.
The reason that she wants to go over and give him a piece of her mind is because he's checking her out, but he's not that handsome.
Right? I mean, that really is, what an astoundingly pathetic reason to walk over and give someone a piece of your mind.
And the fact is that it's because she feels insulted by the fact that he's checking her out, and he's not that handsome, that her vanity is so stung that she wants to go over there and yell at him.
I mean, what an astoundingly unsympathetic heroine!
Rather than feeling some sympathy for a man who's so disgruntled in his relationship that he's looking at another woman, she actually just feels like, oh, who are you, buddy, to check me out when you're not that handsome yourself?
You're checking me out as if you think that you might have a chance with me, but you're so homely that you never would, and I want to give you a piece of my mind.
This is a species of the shallowest kind of bullying that you can imagine.
And, I mean, this is like junior high school stuff, where the pretty girls feel the right to, or have the right...
To snarl at and to put down the not-so-pretty girls and the not-so-handsome or rich boys who have the temerity to eye them over.
You know, that sort of, what are you looking at?
It really is the saddest and most pitiful kind of bullying that is really based on the shallowest kind of hierarchy, which is, how does somebody look?
And she also doesn't wonder, at least there doesn't seem to be any particular wondering about his motivations, why He might, in fact, be looking at her.
And he might think she's a long-lost sister.
He might feel that they've met before.
He might have known her brother and seen a picture of her but isn't sure.
But she's imputing all of this incredibly shallow and vain stuff.
Like, he's checking her out because he's not happy with his current partner.
And he's insulting her by checking her out because he's not that handsome.
So she's building up this entire story about why this man is looking at her and has absolutely no idea.
And of course, if there's any justice in this minimalist kind of plot, then she'll go over there hot-tempered because she feels that she's being put down by being checked out by a guy who's less attractive than she is and find out that she's completely wrong and learn something, hopefully, about jumping to conclusions about other people and so on and so on and so on.
But... That's sort of enough about the story itself.
I guess except for one other thing where this woman, Charlotte's ex-husband, Terrence, look over Charlotte's shoulder one meal and see Nancy, the new wife.
So she's in this situation where this other woman...
Is with the companion checking out another woman over lunch.
And she still feels hostile.
And I guess this is because maybe she feels she's been put in the position of the woman who displaced her as the wife of Terrence, her husband.
And so she feels angry at this guy because...
He reminds her of her husband who's checking out another woman and ended up going off with another woman.
But because she's so petty and shallow, it's really hard to have sympathy for her about being left by her husband.
In fact, if you think about the husband being married to somebody who's this incredibly self-involved, this uncurious towards other people, this judgmental on a very shallow and materialistic basis, this hot-tempered, vain, prickly, and hostile woman, whose sole pleasure in life is a nice piece of pickerel.
It's really hard not to say to the man, to Terence, to the husband who left her, well, good thing, good riddance.
Why would you want to be with somebody like this, or have somebody like this in your life?
It would be... I mean, a pretty brutal thing to have someone like this in your life.
You'd spend your whole time talking them out of their tree of fantasies and talking them out of getting irritable towards other people and talking them out of, you know, this is the kind of woman who would drag you down for getting a slight middle-aged paunch or starting to lose your hair or having receding gum lines while herself not having any consciousness of her own aging and her own physical deterioration, which of course begins to occur about after the age of 30.
And This would be an enormously neurotic and exhausting woman to be around.
So it's hard to have any kind of sympathy for her.
But the writer seems to have a lot of sympathy for her.
So he's following her thoughts without judgment.
And he's making her out to be some sort of...
I guess there's some sort of brave element to her.
Or she's going to go and give this man who's staring at her a piece of her mind.
So maybe people feel like, yay, you go, sister.
You tell this man that it's rude to do this, that, or the other.
And... That, to me, is just very interesting, and I'll sort of talk about why I find it particularly repulsive just as we finish off here.
So, this woman obviously is portrayed as having some sort of sense of self-respect, some sort of sense of a moral standard, right?
So she doesn't like being stared at at lunch, and so she's going to go and give a piece of her mind to this man.
So she's interested in righting wrongs and doing the right thing and this, that, and the other.
Now, of course, here we have a writer who could claim, I think legitimately, that he is interested in moral questions.
Should you stare at a woman over lunch?
Is it rude? Is it wrong?
And so on. And so he's put a sort of little moral situation together here where somebody's staring at a woman over lunch and she's going to go over and give him a piece of her mind.
Of course, this never happens in the real world, this kind of...
Aggressive confidence never happens in the real world, except from, you know, really crazy borderline personalities who get really prickly and yell at people for no reason.
But, you know, sane human beings don't go over and confront other people at lunch because they've been felt that they've been stared at.
I mean, really, disturbed personalities will do that because they have no sense of boundaries and very little sense of social shame.
But most people simply won't.
At least I've never heard of or seen anybody who does that.
So of course this is all. And of course, you know, why would somebody be staring at you that much over lunch?
The fundamental unbelievability of it all is that he's like, he's watching her fork.
I mean, there's that really nice metaphor about his head being tethered to her fork.
But nobody stares at you that much.
If you want to check somebody out, you give them a very surreptitious glance while you pass your hand over your face.
And of course, if Christina wants me to see To check out, you know, some other woman and how she's dressed or something like that.
Then she'll say, you know, turn around, but very quietly and very surreptitiously and don't make it obvious and so on.
People just don't stare at other people, right?
It just doesn't happen in the real world.
But even if we accept that all of this unbelievable stuff is actually happening, Then we do have the problem of trying to understand the writer's moral approach.
So he's interested in having this woman right this wrong and having her confront this guy because it's dramatic and so on, although completely unbelievable.
And the amazing thing to me is, imagine going forward a thousand years.
Sorry, I don't mean to give you a time whiplash, but just, you know, put this on for a moment if you don't mind.
Imagine going forward a thousand years and knowing that we were in the last 10 to 15 years of our civilization because, you know, government power was so swollen, massive deficits, and getting involved in wars overseas and invasions, and Canada's got troops in Iraq and troops in Afghanistan, and I'm sure that they have some UN peacekeepers now in the Middle East, and We have a massive debt and we have a crumbling social infrastructure and, you know, we really are sort of in the last times of the Western experiment with Keynesian economics.
And you knew that this society was teetering on the brink of dissolution and a massive catastrophic change in its sort of structural organization that the power, you would look at a graph maybe of the power of the state and the rise of public debt and The rise of regulations and the enslavement of the general population and so on, the problems of poverty and the rising problems with getting medical care and so on.
And you would look at that a thousand years from now and then you would pick up this story.
And you would say, you would have a look at it and you would say to yourself, okay, so this is what the artists were dealing with when society was really on the edge of self-destruction.
When you were sort of the last couple of years of the Roman Empire, when everything was really crumbling and there was an enormous change, a massive catastrophic change coming in, the first in hundreds of years, really the greatest change coming up since the separation of church and state.
And here's what the far-seeing, socially aware, conscious, published writers are talking about.
They're talking about a woman having lunch and liking her fish.
I mean, is it just me, or is there an absolutely massive disparity between the situation in the West and what people are writing about?
I mean, to me, it's absolutely astounding.
Shakespeare was writing about...
Shakespeare was in a time of far less transition than we're going to be facing over the next 10 or 20 years, and he was writing about the deaths of kings and wars and so on.
And, you know, here we have a situation where society is really crumbling around us, and we have basically a dramatized restaurant menu.
Right? That's the basis of what's going on.
She liked her fish, and someone stared at her.
This is what writers...
I'm not just speaking on this short story.
I know that it's published in a paper, and it's got to be non-controversial, and so on.
But could we not, at least to some degree, have any kind of conversation in a sort of public artistic arena about anything that has any relevance or any importance whatsoever or has any kind of depth whatsoever?
And I sort of want you to, if you don't mind, even if you try this on, I think it'll be interesting for you.
When you watch movies or you read books or even, I guess, if you read newspapers, I think it's a fascinating thing to think of it in terms of a family structure.
Because in families, you know what the issues are by what is never talked about, right?
I mean, in just about every family, there's this, what's called the elephant in the room, right?
There's this huge elephant in the room, and everybody has to step around it, but pretend also that there's no elephant there, right?
So everyone's stepping around it because they know the elephant's there, but they've all got to say, elephant?
There's no such thing as an elephant.
No elephant here. And the same thing is true of society.
Why is a story like this published?
And why is it only stories like this are published?
I had a writing teacher named Elizabeth Harper who wrote a book called Excessive Joy Injures the Heart which is about, I think, a woman I can barely remember but it's beautifully written in terms of the sentences.
I call them models because they're very pretty but very empty.
But it's about a woman who gets massages and likes her masseuse And really that's about it.
And this is all just absolutely fascinating.
This is the stuff that's getting published these days.
Absolutely inconsequential, minutiae, about dull people's everyday observations.
And the ultimate drama is, I'm eating nice fish and someone's looking at me.
And I swear to God, when people talk about this, or have a look back at this a thousand years from now, or even a hundred years from now, maybe even fifty years from now, they're going to shake their head and say, what the hell was wrong with this culture?
That they were facing this sort of chasm, and all they could talk about was restaurant items.
It was menu items.
It was very nice fish.
I mean, it's deranged.
It's absolutely deranged.
It's like, I mean, artists to some degree are the doctors of society.
They're supposed to diagnose the ailments, and maybe they can't provide solutions.
That's more for the philosophers, but at least they can diagnose the ailments.
And this is sort of like you've got a terrible pileup In a hospital, sorry, on a road near a hospital, a terrible pileup, and people are being sort of hauled in, missing body parts and gushing blood and so on.
And the doctor is saying to the nurse, you know, I had a really nice lunch today.
And I had the ham and cheese.
It was actually quite delicate.
And I think they used a new kind of mustard that really blended well with the Havarti and I've got to tell you, I mean, I don't know who makes these sandwiches, and it does seem to change from day to day, but boy, that one was really special.
I thought of ordering two, but then I thought that it might make me a little sleepy in the afternoon, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He's having this completely banal chat while the bodies are piling up, blood splashing all over the floor, people are dying all around him, and this is what he considers the most important thing to chat about.
Not, you know, yelling out incomprehensible medical jargon about getting something stat and clamping this and subdural hematoma the other.
No, he's chatting about his lunch and how much he enjoyed it.
But, you know, I think some cafeteria lady was staring me over lunch and I thought, jeez, did I get a sunburn?
Do I have a mole? Blah, blah, blah.
You know, this is the level of minutiae.
And the reason that it's published and the reason that it's written and the reason that it's distributed across the country is that art is supposed to talk about the most important things in life, right?
I mean, this is the sort of fundamental thing.
Everything in art... Everything in life is not chosen, right?
So if in art you make a character tall, that's a statement.
If you put him in a wheelchair, that's another statement.
These things in life mean nothing because they're biological accidents.
But if you make a character...
In character, if a life is a cripple, Sorry, in real life, if somebody is a cripple, it means nothing in terms of their moral, ethical, or any kind of aesthetic nature.
In art, if you choose to make someone a cripple, well, they don't have to be crippled because they're a creation, but if you choose to make someone a cripple, it is a fundamental statement about them as a human being.
It's everything in art is a metaphor, almost nothing in life is a metaphor.
And this is a major difference in art.
In art, we're trying to draw people's attention to the most important stuff which they'll miss in their day-to-day situations, right?
So... So artists are supposed to be talking about the most important stuff, the stuff that we're missing.
And artists these days, in general, are talking about absolutely nothing.
Particularly in the realm of modern fiction.
I have a very tough time reading modern fiction for just this kind of reason.
They're talking about absolutely nothing.
And the reason that they're talking about absolutely nothing, and people are publishing and distributing all of this nothing-speak, is because everybody's stepping around the elephant in the room.
You know that we're a culture on its last legs, One of the reasons we're on its last legs is the artist won't talk about anything.
And one of the reasons the artist won't talk about anything is, as an artist who'd been trying to talk about something for 20 years and gotten precisely virtually, not totally, but precisely virtually squat published, I can understand that people will pay you an enormous amount to talk about nothing.
It's the same way that a family will give you an inheritance if you never bring anything up that's dysfunctional.
And if you do bring something up that's dysfunctional, they will probably disown you or want to get rid of you or want you to shut up at least.
And if you don't shut up, they will not want to talk to you anymore.
You're well paid to pretend there's no elephant in the room and to communicate that there's no elephant in the room.
Because, you know, the people in power, whether it's your parents or the state or the church or whatever, The people who are in power want to stay there, or at least want to continue pillaging before the whole thing comes crashing down, and so there's a very strong undertow or current or pressure to talk about nothing in this life, and there's nowhere that that's more clear than the realm of art, where you get drivly little unimportant nothing stories like the one that you're reading.
And people are going to look at this in the future, look back and say, what a bunch of deranged human beings.
Talk about fiddling when Rome burns.
I mean, these are the doctors who, in the middle of a plague or a physical disaster, are chatting about their canoe trip on the weekend and not treating anyone, not even noticing that there's anything wrong.
And, boy, if you ever want to really experience hostility, there's two things that you can do.
I guess there's three, but there's two that you can do a little bit more easily.
The first thing that you can do is talk to your family about anything real or anything meaningful.
Then you'll get an enormous amount of hostility.
And the second, which is a very related item, is if you know an artist who's writing this kind of drivel, just write to them and say, do you think this is the most important stuff to be working on at the moment when there's wars and plagues and famine and growth of state power and diminishment of human freedom, the war on terror, terrorism...
Do you really think that talking about a woman who has a lunch is the most important thing that you could be doing with your time and talent if you have a gift as a communicator?
And boy, if you ever want to see rank hostility, that's fine.
Because the artists themselves are not honest, right?
Again, I don't have a problem with somebody writing something like this.
But if you say to them, is there not more important stuff to be working on, they could say, well, sure, but I'm trying to make my living as a writer, and nobody will pay me to write about anything important.
Trust me, I've tried writing about important stuff, and nobody wants to have anything to do with it, so I have to write this drivel in order to make a buck.
Hey, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily respect the whole thing, but you've got to at least respect that kind of honesty.
But the reason you'll get hostility is all these artists think that they're doing this wonderful stuff, writing these beautiful little gem-like sentences.
And a lot of the sentences are beautiful, but what they add up to is an enormous amount of obscuring of all of the real issues that are actually important in the world.
And this is why the society is going to collapse, because the artists aren't stepping up to talk about anything real.
And, of course, they've learned that from their families, and it's reinforced through the state, as I've talked about for many moons.
Anyway, thank you so much for listening.
I really appreciate it.
I hope that you found this little snippet of art interesting.
I found it quite interesting to read.
And I hope that I sort of invite you to have a look at the stuff that you're reading.
Or you can even see this in terms of movies.
Just all of the stuff that's not talked about.
All of the stuff that's not talked about is really, really quite fascinating.
You can find this in the West Wing in particular.
But I hope that you'll find that a useful exercise.
Because it really is important to start delineating all of the stuff that is not mentioned in the world.
And so that you can start to see the shape of the elephant in the room by where everyone is stepping around.
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