Malte Woicke Woicke itibaren Eaton, OH 44044, Yhdysvallat
Proposition one. The World is Shit. It's true. The world is shit. It's also true that I'm lying. One there are many wonderful and great things in the world that make the world a pretty awesome place, I forget those things when I say something like Life is Shit. But, I'm also lying to myself in the other direction, the world / life is actually much much worse than I give it credit for. If I actually spent sometime thinking about how many awful / stupid / criminal things are carried out by people every second of everyday I'd lose all hope in living and probably try to figure out a way to blow up this cesspool of a planet. I don't do this because I delude myself constantly that things really aren't that bad. Proposition two. Plato lied. In the allegory of the cave every philosophy student and wannabe intellectual jerk off learns a lesson that is incredibly hurtful to their development. In the cave story all these people are in a cave and they are dazzled by shadows on the wall, and they think it is the real world they are looking at. One dude, the philosopher, he wanders outside of the cave one day and sees that there is a real world everyone else is ignorant about. He gets really excited and runs back to share this wonderful news with everyone else. They kill him. Why? Because they are happy with the world they live in, they don't give a shit about this more real than real world, they just want to be left in peace, to look at their shadows, get drunk on unwatered down wine and fuck little boys (this is Ancient Greece). Sadly this story isn't meant as a cautionary tale when it's taught in schools, and I'm sure every philosophy student somewhere in their head gets the idea that they are learning about the Real world, not the shadowy world their parents and all those dolts live in. These people will never understand them, but that won't stop them from being enormous pretentious dicks to just about anyone they talk to, because it's their evangelical mission to preach the Truth, just like some fucking Born Again. True people aren't going to kill them (or maybe they will), but I think they will find out soon that either a) no one gives a fuck and they will ignore them; b) that the only people who care about their Truth are locked away in University's where nothing they really do matters to the real world; and / or c) this discovery of the Truth, is really just going to help fuel the despair and depression that probably drove them to obtuse books to begin with, and this new alienation on top of previous alienations will make their own lives that much more unbearable. So what's so good about leaving the cave? (I sort of give away the plot, but not really here) A Night of Serious Drinking is about leaving the drunken deluded real world to go onto a higher one where people have escaped the shackles of mundane existence. The narrator goes to see those who think they have escaped from the drunken world after a night of getting shit faced with a whole gaggle of people who ultimately annoy him. Right before he goes most of the party wanders off to find religion. The only way to escape this drunken world is to go mad or die. The narrators taken to see these mad people as a favor. What he finds is a whole new level of pretentious assholes who think that they are removed from the world and doing great things. The narrator moves through different groups of people who have found their own ways of 'freedom', and finds each more annoying and stupid than the one before. Ultimately he returns home and falls into a despair that the world is totally shit with no hope. There is a bit of an upbeat ending tagged on to here too, and a really great quote but I can't seem to find my copy of the book so I'll just add it later. The book offers no real hope. It's critical of all forms of escapism, and kind of maintains that without escapism the world is unbearable. Why this book what put out by an Eastern Religion publisher is beyond me. I don't see anything really Eastern about it except for a pretty amusing swipe at trendy followers of Buddhism (was there a trend in this in the 1930's? This book feels really contemporary in its criticism, which just adds to my long standing idea that there were no good old days, people were just as dumb then as now and that maybe the Greatest Generation were just a bunch of assholes too, maybe prime assholes number one because they unleashed all kinds of insidious things on the world, marketed to a younger generation and then washed their hands of the whole thing, but then I think that the Baby-Boomers are really the assholes, but then there are the generations before those two and the ones to come, and maybe it's not one particular generation that is shit, but all generations right from Adam begetting Able right down to whoever was the last person to beget someone at the time of this writing). Interesting stuff.
As much as I love the Vorkosigan books, the Chalion series are actually my favorite Bujolds. Every time I read them, they just sucks me in all over again.