Conjectures
Upbraided, justly, for not having fulfilled his potential, he contented himself with the thought—that the one upbraiding him has.
The real digital divide is between those who understand the internet primarily as allegory and as symbol.
Truly to know another person. Is that to know them as they are, or as they think they are. The “unknowability of the other”—much discussed. But isn’t the real point that none of us knows ourselves. If you do not know yourself, how am I to know you? Am I to grasp you in your self-delusion? Or does to know you—not just know about you—mean knowing you more profoundly than you know yourself? (Corollary: the possibility of another’s knowledge of us is a function of our self-knowledge and falls into a bimodal distribution—those who know themselves the least and who know themselves the most being most amenable to being known. To know oneself the least is to betray oneself. To know oneself the most is, literally, to heighten the quality of the object; it is to give greater reality to, hence, greater purchase upon, the thing that might be known. The murky middle: impossible of self-presence, impossible of presence to another. The degree of our self-knowledge—utterly absent, utterly present—is the condition, in fact, of our literal reality, or lack thereof.)
