Saturday, January 24, 2015

My World

Work and Play

To leave my place of work, where the kids have the radio tuned to the worst available pop station, with its aggressive, vocoder-strained, auto-tuned mediocrity (a fat butch, wearing a foot brace from a drunken accident, is explaining to a disinterested teenager how much better the song I Don't Give a Fuck is in its un-edited form) to come home and listen to a concert performance of Bach's cantatas, is to suspect that to live in the modern world, for all its comforts, opportunity, variety and safety, is nonetheless to live in a kind of hell.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not the modern world; Western thought has always conceptualized earthly existence as a kind of hell. There is no other explanation for the combination of consciousness and mortality.

But you can make a nice little corner of Hell with Bach playing in the background. So there's that.

Gutenberg said...

“At nightfall I return home and enter my study. There on the threshold I remove my dirty, mud-spattered clothes, slip on my regal and courtly robes, and thus fittingly attired, I enter the ancient courts of bygone men where, having received a friendly welcome, I feed on the food that is mine alone and that I was born for. I am not ashamed to speak with them and inquire into the reasons for their actions; and they answer me in kindly fashion. And so for four hours I feel no annoyance; I forget all troubles; poverty hold no fears, and death loses its terrors. I become entirely one of them.”

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