Modern man has this distinction: he thinks he is important. And he runs to a psychologist when he unconsciously suspects that he is not. The depression he suffers at forty begins in childhood and extends into youth, when he grows up bombarded with lies, feeding in his mind a false vision of himself. He smiles because life offers him wonderful prospects; “future” is always an auspicious word; he starts to believe. And with the years, he has to face severe frustrations. Is it life’s fault? Obviously not: life has nothing to do with the animal’s presumption! Life is the victim of an epidemic falsification, a frightening incomprehension, and an unprecedented demeaning. A young person is trained, like a dog, to give certain answers to “what will he do with his life,” socially admirable answers, and learns to see the world in a mediocre light, valuing that which has no value. He begins by making mistakes about himself and ends up making mistakes about life.
Category: Notes
The Midlife Crisis
Many psychologists put too much emphasis on the nostalgic aspects of the so-called “midlife crisis”. I do not deny their importance, but I believe they are only the banal manifestation of a problem that may be much deeper. Midlife usually denotes facing failure, seeing what was once called a “dream” buried. In other cases, in cases of “success,” it characterizes the period when the uselessness of one’s achievements, the stupidity of daily life, and the lack of spirit to move forward are exposed. All of this is due to frustration with the present, not a desire to relive the past. At twenty, life is interesting because it is promising, because it is full of “perspectives” that time takes care to eclipse. The individual then finds himself immersed in a vacuum. Ultimately, middle-age does nothing but highlight the meaninglessness of existence. But it also makes him open his eyes and reason, and if there is something we can call “maturity,” it usually requires what clinical psychology calls “depression”. The depressed person testifies his mental sanity.
Blessing or Weakness?
It can be admitted without much difficulty that a dog is capable of thinking. However, a dog certainly does not believe. I say this and I notice a human differential. A differential that I cannot summarize as a blessing or weakness: belief elevates the human being above all other animals to the same extent that it makes him susceptible to error and evil. If I have great esteem for skeptics, I realize that they lack something. Sometimes it seems necessary to embrace a weakness to transcend the mediocrity of the concrete…
400 Days Without Dostoevsky
I exercise my tare for numbers. I am now 400 days without reading a page of Dostoevsky. Everything indicates that I will chase the record of 635 days of abstinence since the first contact. I seem to have fun looking elsewhere for what I already know I will not find. Dostoevsky’s work is a rare stage where the true and greatest problems of human existence are represented. But that is not what I wanted to say… I have a habit of evoking in mind my idols and making comparisons. I notice my mediocre problems and twists and turns, so I visualize, for example, the genius orphaned by his mother at fifteen, with his father murdered at seventeen and sentenced to death ten years later. But that is not all. I also compare the bitterness of these lines with the light emanating from those of the genius. All this even though I am not in physical contact with his books. Then I reflect. It is good to synthesize a work by exposing the problems it deals with and, when they exist, the solutions it offers. But beyond this: one does it well by delineating the various nuances that compose it. And in Dostoevsky, good humor abounds, even if the blind man cannot see it. His biography is summarized in a succession of difficulties of the most varied natures, and his work, synthesized, represents a hopeful and optimistic outlook that prevails over all of them. It is interesting to note the contrast, i.e., the apparent contrast that we see when we use the myopic and materialistic viewpoint that summarizes the experience in “good” and “bad” situations, “successes” and “misfortunes”, and compare the life and work of great personalities. If we consider that a work largely reflects experience, the mind points us to impressive conclusions.