Could Anyone Say This About You?

Link [he doesn’t title entries in this blog. grrrr….]

He does, but it wasn’t obvious to me. It’s titled Hmm.

[…] after meeting Whitman, Stoker described him as “all that I had ever dreamed of, or wished for” […]

Our brains float in the fake imagery of a billion TV shows, movies, books, music videos, advertisements, et al.

We are too self-absorbed for introspection (as contradictory as that is, it is), so we don’t wonder what a human being is or should be and if we do or ever can approach that.

The imagery, it’s fake. All of it. Real human beings do not act like that. Those humanoids are the creations of writers. I know this. I am a writer. We do it to capture your attention — something that is slipping away and also shortening every day. We want to excite you. Very few of us have the goal of providing guides to a better life or ways to act that will improve your life. Give us the money, here’s your excitement, now go away.

With our damage in your head.

Which you then think is a reflection of reality.

In your self-absorption, you never stop to think if anything you’ve seen or heard is true or real or even good. Your brain has atrophied as your glands have expanded. Silence is now your enemy, because all that’s left in your head is the sad echo of emptiness. The glands need stimulation, so you must have noise. Noise now defines you. Only noise makes you feel alive. But it’s a fake sense of living. You’ve become a puppet, to be driven by any random noise that can engage your glands.

You’ve been taken in hand and have been carved out. There is no longer a You. There is only a collection of shit you have allowed other people to put in you. You have become a patchwork of primitive glandular stimulus-response. The only emotion left to you is fear and its thin and obvious masquerade: rage.

You’ve been cheated and robbed and don’t realize you’ve been an unwitting accomplice to those who have stolen You.

And as you walk around as the new monstrosity you have become, a species of monstrosity that grows in population every year, its the people who crave silence, who need solitude, those who are without the quick, glib, glandular-stimulating response, who are redefined by you as weird, as stupid, as losers.

When I read of Stoker’s reaction to Whitman, I have to wonder: What have we lost? What have we thrown away?

I don’t have the quote handy, but someone else had a similar reaction upon meeting Lafcadio Hearn.

What kind of people were these?

What kind of people are we now?