Monday, October 5, 2009

Blah blah blah, said the idea to itself.

I was thinking a lot about the idea of the self, the self, or as its called from the inside, I. YOu know this strange little thing that everyone has, this odd tiny organ which the surgeons can't touch. One afternoon, I asked myself, what about that noise I always hear, that intolerable noise which comes from somewhere inside my head. ANd I realized that rather like a singer who accompanies his own singing with a piano or a guitar, I accompany my own life with a sort of endless tinkling or an endless noodling or murmuring - a sort of awful inner murmuring of reportage and opinions, idiotic arpeggios of self-approbation - "Yes, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm doing, and this is the right thing to be doing now, because murmur, murmur, murmur, and this is right because murmur, murmur, murmur, and this is right becasue murmur, murmur, murmur - " I thought about all the isncere consideration which I gave to the future, to my plans, you know, and all the solemn concern I lavished each day on the events of my past - my "memories," as we call them, wiping away a few tears - and I wondered: Was this all tremendously valuable? Or was it perhaps just a bit unnecessary, when you consider the fact - rather often overlooked - that the past and the future don't actually exist? I sit around thinking about them from morning till night, but you know, where are they? Where are they? I mean, they're not here. And God knows they're certainly not anwere else, I would say. And so what is it supposed to mean to me that the trousers I'm wearing were worn "yesterday" by a man with my name, a man who did this, a man who did that, or that they'll be worn "tomorrow" by a man who is going to be doing something or other? It all means exactly nothing to me, because none of these people actually exist.- Wallace Shawn, THe Designated Mourner.

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