Macademia

Yesterday was gorgeous: one of those pioneering spring days when the city suddenly blossoms with stoned street performers and knock-kneed teenage girls in too-short skirts. I had a doctor's appointment and arrived at the office in shorts and a tank top, meeting the jealous stares of nurses and reception staff who'd been inside their concrete fortress since the wee hours. "Is it true that there's.... sun?"

While waiting for my name to be called, I sat near an elderly man, who looked oddly familiar, and started on the last chapter of The Poetics of Space ("The Phenomenology of Roundness" -- you just can't get any more Continental). Then the elderly man's name was called, and I realized that this was not just "an elderly man," but one of the most important scholars in my field, author of numerous canonical texts and protege of Roman fucking Jakobson. I'd seen him at various colloquia and seminars, but something about seeing him in a doctor's reception room -- leafing through a dog-eared doctor's office copy of Time magazine while waiting for a nurse in Hawaiian print scrubs to check his blood pressure and cholesterol -- just didn't quite click in my brain. I was still mulling this over as I lay on the examining bed in a flimsy paper sack and the doctor poked and prodded me in every intimate inch of my body, all while droning on about the weather. "It's supposed to be 70 degrees on Saturday! Feet up into the stirrups, please."

From the diary of Witold Gombrowicz:

Thursday

How should I explain why existentialism did not lead me astray?

Perhaps I was close to choosing an existence, which they call authentic — in contrast to a frivolous temporal life, which they call banal. That is how great the pressure of seriousness is from all sides. Today, in today’s raw times, there is no thought or art which does not shout to you in a loud voice: don’t escape, don’t play, don’t poke fun at yourself, don’t run away! Fine. I, too, in spite of everything, would also prefer not to lie to my own being. I, therefore, tried this authentic life, full of loyalty to existence in myself. But what do you want? It can’t be done. It can’t be done because that authenticity turned out to be falser than all my previous deceptions, games, and leaps taken together. I, with my artistic temperament, don’t understand much theory, but I do have a nose when it comes to style. When I applied maximum consciousness to life, in an attempt to found my existence on this, I noticed that something stupid was happening to me. Too bad, but no way. It can’t be done. It seems impossible to meet the demands of Dasein and simultaneously have coffee and croissants for an evening snack. To fear nothingness, but to fear the dentist more. To be consciousness, which walks around in pants and talks on the telephone. To be responsibility, which runs little shopping errands downtown. To bear the weight of significant being, to instill the world with meaning and then return the change from ten pesos. What do you want?*

*Emphatic emphasis all mine.