Nietzsche has something to say about everything. Including Facebook Distraction, an ‘impulse’ whose ‘vehemence’ we seek to combat, and for which he has found ‘not more than six essentially different methods.’ (‘The Dawn of Day‘, trans. JM Kennedy, Allen Unwin, 1924, Section 109)
Tag Archives: neurotics
The Phenomenology Of Encounters With Notification Icons
It’s 630 AM or so; you’re awake, busy getting your cup of coffee ready. (Perhaps you’re up earlier like the truly virtuous or the overworked, which in our society comes to the same thing.) Your coffee made, you fire up your smartphone, laptop, tablet, or desktop, and settle down for the morning service at theContinue reading “The Phenomenology Of Encounters With Notification Icons”
Then, The Eagerly Awaited Letter; Now, The Notification
Every weekday of my two years in boarding school bore witness to the implacable ritual of the mail from home: run to the teacher’s staff-room, ask for the day’s letters and postcards–sorted into piles corresponding to your ‘house‘–and then, surrounded by eager supplicants, call out the names of the lucky ones. At the end ofContinue reading “Then, The Eagerly Awaited Letter; Now, The Notification”
The Pleasures of “Emotional Difficulties”
In his review of several exhibitions showcasing the work of Félix Vallotton, Julian Bell writes: Vallotton is not so much an autobiographical artist as an artist who coolly and procedurally recognizes that his own emotional difficulties might supply him with viable imaginative material. Vallotton wouldn’t be the first or last artist to recognize this, ofContinue reading “The Pleasures of “Emotional Difficulties””
The Vale of Tears: From Babe to Adult
There are times when I hear my little baby girl crying yet again–perhaps when she is hungry, or tired, or needs a diaper changed, or perhaps worse of all, has been ‘put down’ to sleep for one of her daily naps–and the thought crosses my mind that it makes perfectly good sense for our speciesContinue reading “The Vale of Tears: From Babe to Adult”
Karl Popper’s Undistinguished Take on Existentialism
In Chapter 18 ‘Utopia and Violence’, of Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper writes: We can see here that the problem of the true and the false rationalisms [Utopianism] is part of a larger problem. Ultimately it is the problem of a sane attitude towards our own existence and its limitations–that very problem of which so muchContinue reading “Karl Popper’s Undistinguished Take on Existentialism”
Mary McCarthy on Madame Bovary as Neurotic
Among the most famous descriptions of Emma Bovary are Mary McCarthy‘s cutting lines: [She] is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling. Ouch. But what follows these lines is a perhaps more interestingContinue reading “Mary McCarthy on Madame Bovary as Neurotic”
Samir Chopra 