LOST AND HOSED

Now whaaat? Some kind of anxiety or bone-deep consadfusion, scundfosion. What is the word for sad confusion? I know, what's wrong with those two? I'll bet some language like German or Urdu has a better phrase. Désespoir is not quite it. Franklin's beloved kitty, Hookah, died last week. Brenna and Nate have to say goodbye to kitty Missy today. I am worried about Miep. But there is more.

The tractor parade and what I saw in Callicoon continue to affect me. As I was discussing with S today, the wrinkles, pain, pleasure, and everything else, written into those faces were hard won. Their expressions felt hyper-real to me. No smoothed and botoxed beauty. No complacency. There was weltzschmerz.



Later that same evening with a tabby clawing my thigh ...
whenever I go away, Cooder is particularly happy to have me around again for the first day or two. She wants lots of cuddles and attention. Makes me think I should go away for a night or two every week.

K posits that sad + confusion = lost.

Continuing to dip into All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in A Secular Age. This is from a talk that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005.

"The cliché that Wallace attempts to revivify in the Kenyon speech is the old pedagogical cliché that a liberal arts education teaches you how to think.

"Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that [this] cliché . . . is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."