Reaction to the World

The 1960s are what most people think of when you talk about social revolution, but as Frank Lloyd Wright once said about architecture, once he had given them the seeds, everyone could grow flowers. The more interesting ideas that informed much of the 60s came from writers in the 1950s.  Beginnings are always more exciting.  The fifties gave artistic form to the philosophical ideas that came before, incorporated them into something less ephemeral, more temporal which, I think, is both charming and fatal.

Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" (1956) was seminal in popularizing existentialism in Great Britain and later in the United States.  It is a book I haven't touched since the 1980s, but I remember the time when I carried it with me, underlining and writing marginalia in afternoon cafes thinking I was the coolest cat on the block.  I might have been.  I wasn't in New York or San Francisco.  I was in a sleepy southern hamlet.  The block was not all that hip.  And there may have been some advantage in that along with all the rest of it.  Ideas were not readily available.  Most of the people who posed as intellectuals didn't know what they were talking about.  I had to work for every piece of information I came by.  And so maybe there was something made up in quality that countered the sparsity.  I can't know for certain.  I only know that I am tenacious and oft dangerous when arguing ideas.

I tried reading some of Wilson's novels and found them garbage, so I'm afraid to go back and look at my old copy of "Outsider."  For all my bragging, my tastes have sometimes been suspect.  I thought Carol King was as good as Joni Mitchell, and I didn't pay attention to the Velvet Underground thinking that The Grateful Dead were the thing.  Don't worry.  I came around.  And at least I never liked Billy Joel or Elton John, and I've always hated the song "Hey Jude."  That all belongs in the category of "musical" rather than "music."

Selah.

I am fighting a deep and abiding depression that I don't believe is caused by the season.  It might be that I've fucked with my body's chemistry for too long.  Or it might be the only rational reaction to my life.  I mean. . . I might be right.  Depression could be the proper response to what I live through daily.  I never hear people say that, never hear them say, "Well, that is the appropriate response to the shit you are living through.  You'd be insane not to be depressed."  Perhaps sometimes we need to privilege depression as the intelligent, natural reaction to things.  When I look at the lives of cheery people, I often think, "My god, you are insane!"

It's something to think about.