the warehouse where we store the parts to build our hall of doom

I've been slowly, slowly reading bits of Thomas Carlyle's Characteristics over the past couple weeks. I find his style a wee bombastic and his conclusions at times altogether wrongheaded. Perhaps those bits are the satire and I'm only misunderstanding them--I am uneducated, after all. But he does deliver me clear-cut diamonds again and again, when I am willing to wade through the haze of windbaggery and the trappings of religiosity (which I mention because generally I am unwilling and that's why I've had this tab open part-time since early October).

Once I've waded in, though, I don't even see the windbaggery anymore, only intriguing ideas packed in lovely, orderly sentences--sturdy and economical where need be, gilt in all the right places. Very Scottish, I suppose. (Or very just-about-anything you'd like to stereotype as such, conveniently enough.)

Underlining is mine. I'd prefer bold, but it doesn't show up as well in my blog as it does in the feed (as viewed with black on white, that is), and I don't want to do a redesign just for this!

How changed in these new days! Truly may it be said, the Divinity has withdrawn from the Earth; or veils himself in that wide-wasting Whirlwind of a departing Era, wherein the fewest can discern his goings. Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle of Necessity embraces all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic Action is paralysed; for what worth now remains unquestionable with him? Aye the fervid period when his whole nature cries aloud for Action, there is nothing sacred under whose banner he can act; the course and kind and conditions of free Action are all but undiscoverable. Doubt storms-in on him through every avenue; inquiries of the deepest, painfulest sort must be engaged with; and the invincible energy of young years waste itself in sceptical, suicidal cavillings; in passionate ‘questionings of Destiny,’ whereto no answer will be returned.

For men, in whom the old perennial principle of Hunger (be it Hunger of the poor Day-drudge who stills it with eighteenpence a-day, or of the ambitious Placehunter who can nowise still it with so little) suffices to fill-up existence, the case is bad; but not the worst. These men have an aim, such as it is; and can steer towards it, with chagrin enough truly; yet, as their hands are kept full, without desperation. Unhappier are they to whom a higher instinct has been given; who struggle to be persons, not machines; to whom the Universe is not a warehouse, or at best a fancy-bazaar, but a mystic temple and hall of doom. For such men there lie properly two courses open. The lower, yet still an estimable class, take up with worn-out Symbols of the Godlike; keep trimming and trucking between these and Hypocrisy, purblindly enough, miserably enough. A numerous intermediate class end in Denial; and form a theory that there is no theory; that nothing is certain in the world, except this fact of Pleasure being pleasant; so they try to realise what trifling modicum of Pleasure they can come at, and to live contented therewith, winking hard. Of those we speak not here; but only of the second nobler class, who also have dared to say No, and cannot yet say Yea; but feel that in the No they dwell as in a Golgotha, where life enters not, where peace is not appointed them.

So in Carlyle's view you can be:

1) A calculated user of religion, miserably oscillating between a devotion to a pure lifestyle and repeated descents into hypocritical failure.

(Perhaps he is saying that's the best you can do at religion when you do not truly believe it can deliver you? This is a clever hypothesis, and one supported nowadays by a heap of psychological research.)

2) A semi-hedonistic absurdist. Different from a straight-up hedonist, due to the knowing wink.

3) A glorious, beautiful, eternal... angsty waffler! (More like a principled fence-sitter, here in Carlyle's imagining... but we all know what that amounts to in real life, played out.)

"You", here, are the person who is both smart and sensitive (one without the other, really, and I think a person's good to go--not precisely happy, but fine enough). You are not capable of viewing the universe as a warehouse or bazaar of pleasing possibilities for sating your animal appetites. You have another appetite beyond those ones--an appetite without object(ive)!--an accidental byproduct of natural selection, the possessor of grotesque, perverse exaggerations of the curiosity, pattern-recognition, and problem-solving drives that allowed us to depart, as a species, from monkeyhood.

The Hall of Doom

You are a freak, in short. But just barely. People not so very different from you have emigrated over mountain ranges and driven armies, at least, and thereby spread their seed. They've amassed security for their progeny in the form of large fortunes won through a few shrewd maneuvers combined with a painstaking vigilance over the underlying structure of their chosen game. But you, you're a step beyond that. You've been twisted so far, you've bent and coiled over yourself like a snake and begun to eat your own tail.

"You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real 'Waller': 

an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit."

-David Foster Wallace, letter to a friend

---

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

 -Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

---

"But you didn't get that because you already got it
And you do not understand
Take a drive
Black hole talking about nothing
You can't get the chicken or the stuffing
Going around and you think you're tough
When you can't kick ass"
-Modest Mouse, "The Fruit That Ate Itself"

You are an errant protein, folded wrong. You are sickle cell anemia, the thing that happens when a person has too much of a quality previously found advantageous. Your kind will be weeded out unless the winds themselves change their nature and come to support your strange wings. This is in part why Nietzsche himself--an angsty waffler of the highest order--said his Superman wasn't you or any other like you, that the Übermensch is more like a conniving, politically-minded cardinal than any holy Percival. And then he collapsed in his own footprint with schizoid grief.

We are weeding ourselves out, really. That is transhumanism, maybe the real revenge of the nerds (even if unwittingly, subconsciously served up). Disguised as mere technological progress, designed only to serve us, our continuing advance doubles as an admission that we cannot continue as we are, nor return to where we came from. For us there is no right place in either scenario. We must become as gods or perish. And truly, the transformation is a death unto itself. We are either a transitional species or else we are extinct in just a few more generations.

Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place

Which is funny, you know. Our "selfish" genes are selfishing themselves right out of existence. They don't know any better, poor little things.

"And the Serpent said unto the Woman: 

Ye shall not surely die. 

For God doth know in the day you eat thereof, 

then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, 

knowing good from evil."

I am not optimistic about this, make no mistake. I am no Kurzweilian, awaiting the rapture of the scientifically-minded. I only acknowledge that, unless we are prevented by a shortage of necessary resources, we will almost certainly engineer ourselves into something else, because we have already engineered a non-trivial portion of humanity into something ill-suited for our present AND ancestral environments.

(Not to mention the fact that we have simultaneously engineered our environment to be ill-suited for the majority of humanity, which is another interesting subject.)

Shit, I wanted to talk more Carlyle. But that's clearly enough for now.