“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
This morning sitting with my coffee I’m reminded of this passage from
Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway”. Here in upstate New York trees are dropping leaves and we’ve entered the season of greyness. I too am out to sea and alone. As for it being very dangerous to live even one day—who would dispute this feeling as the oligarchs and fascists bomb hospitals across the globe? In short, feeling deeply and with a sense of precarity is the true dark phenomenology of living and there’s no help for it.
Claude writes: “Woolf’s novel is less about events than about consciousness, memory, mortality, class, and the lingering damage of war.” This is true but AI can’t capture the terrible state of mind that the American poet James Tate once referred to as “crucial moments before a shave”—the very business of living is reduced to the most essential actions, or, inactions. Not an elegant sentence, I agree. Do you, like me, feel that your consciousness is now a dented can?
Look at Claude’s list: “consciousness, memory, mortality, class, and the lingering damage of war.”
While the talking heads on TV and in the cyber-spheres go on and on about Trump’s hair or the bulges in his suit, those of us with souls intact are struggling with the biggest issues of all.
Again, James Tate: “Come quick, Hans—a leaf has fallen inside me.”
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
