Conjectures
That stupid intonation people have when winding up say precisely nothing. Verbal open quotation marks. First tremors of a nostrum.
The indirect allusion (call it the subtweet) is better for the man on the go. He does not have time to stand by his words (to loiter).
Your entire effort should be that of composing yourself into a question.
The oracle will deliver its answer instantly. But the question—sounding the depth of your being—must be lived.
One’s life continues to need to be a quest, even if one can visit the oracle. And one should not be in constant contact with the oracle.
One ought to have to journey to it. How to preserve solitude, separation, and depth. (Starlink is trepanning our wilderness. At least we can be far from chargers? Ultimately, everything will have to be voluntary.)
The beautiful face essentially yawns, on the spiritual plane. Our mortal selves are the husks of those enactments.
If the beautiful face does not yawn, she has made the greatest sacrifice: of the eternal for the temporal.
McClellan vs Lincoln after Antietam as a parable of immediacy. McClellan was there; Lincoln was in Washington. Lincoln was right—though, of course, McClellan could always have claimed: “You weren’t there.”
Self-government (i.e., democracy) in the literal sense implies the capability to restrain oneself. Activist-ism, in contrast, is anti-government: not in the deregulative sense, but in the sense that it recognizes no legitimate limitation of its own action; the only limit it recognizes is the force of the opposing party, which it seeks to push as far as it can. Mainstream progressive politics of the 2020s were “anti-government” in this sense: in that they externalized the sources of limitation of their projects. (And thereby disavowed them.) Hence the spuriousness of its “radicalism.” Activistism never sees itself as in charge; it always sees itself as making demands form those who are truly in charge. An authentic political movement must be self-limiting, self-defining, self-governing.
Thought needs a lattice
A structure on which the organic takes form.
