Hello {{first_name | Reader}},
I’ve just posted a new Low Visibility Ahead entry, “Their Wounds Are Our Fates.”
“Psychoanalysts are notorious for saying there is no such thing as an accident, which is probably overstating the case. But it’s no accident that the people now running our world were born into an environment of unimaginable violence, both societal and familial. Along the way they learned to use death as a survival tool...”
Read the full entry on my website at johnrember.com/blog/their-wounds-are-our-fates.
Recommended Reading
According to articles by counselors, financial analysts, and cultural commentators, young people in America are suffering through a crisis of faith in damned near everything. A partial list: they don’t believe in a financial future, they don’t believe that consumer goods can make you happy, they don’t believe that cultural icons retain any trace of the sacred.
I can’t say as I blame them, given our present climatic, political, and ethical circumstances, but I do wish Gen Z wasn’t acting like they have discovered nihilism. It makes them look naive and foolish, and it deprives them of the wisdom of some astonishing intellects who have wrestled with the Angel of Nothing and survived. So I’m recommending three books this time around, written by people who grappled with nothingness and produced some astonishing works of literature in the process. I list them in order of difficulty:
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain
The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
None of these are what I would call beach reads. All of them contain a savage irony that can be as bracing for your consciousness as it is appalling for your faith in human nature.
They won't inoculate young people against believing in nothing, but they will show them the magnitude of the danger it represents. They also show that the human intellect is not defenseless against a world devoid of meaning. It takes work and tears to make meaning in this world, but it is possible to construct a framework for sanity and decent behavior. It’s been done before, even if it seems like we have to start from scratch every generation.
Julie and I celebrated the 30th anniversary of our marriage on August 17. Thirty years is long enough to mount a defense against nihilism. We hiked to Fourth of July Lake and walked back off trail, climbing over deadfall and once again failing to find that gingerbread house we’ve heard about.
We’ve found a lot of meaning in living a simple, loving life as each other’s significant other, and although the odds are overwhelming against that life lasting another 30 years (I’d be 105), we’re hoping for another few good years before our time together ends.
Living the good life at the Sun Valley Music Festival