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mood |
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at last, free |
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music |
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iron and wine - jesus the mexican boy |
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I never understood why people engage in idle conversation. The fact is that people talk. I often see people have conversations about all sorts of things. They talk about their worries and their excitements and comment on the things that go about around them. I do this too. The ultimate reason for it escapes me, although if you ask yourself, it may be that the answer is merely to pass the time.
But this question still confounds, but follow my reasoning for a moment. We could talk sociology or psychology or better yet philosophy, but ultimately, spiritually and emphatically, we just want to say what is on our minds. As much as I can infer, there is some intuitive need to speak aloud what we are taken up in, what is bothering us, and what we want so badly.
Now follow me. What I wish to espouse is that all instances of communication, every time that we compose a sentence to write or think or say, there is an inherent assumption of importance. What I mean is that I assume that at the most objective, dispassionate level, there is nothing in this world particularly worth mentioning above anything else in the world. This is a particular opinion derived by logic and observation, which happens to resemble aspects of existentialistic and absurdist philosophies. Yet, by virtue of humanity, we are able to imbue things with subjective meaning, importance.
Let me lay this out again. If we ask ourselves what is important, then, should we find anything, we can ask ourselves "Why it is important?" To that answer, we can ask the same question, "Why is it important?" Why is anything important? Ultimately, I have never found any answer that is effectively more than "Because it just is. Because we feel that it's important." Thus, everything we do and say is an exercise in subjectivity. We would not do or say anything except for the feeling that we should.
Specifically applied to instances of language, everything that we say has some inherent assumption of importance, some self-evident pertinence, which in general we take for granted. We don't typically question the value of idle conversation. But if we scrutinize the assumed values in each statement, there is always some presumed importance in everything mentioned that allows us to regard every topic with a kind of sentimental appreciation.
That is, there is no real, objective importance to the crises of gas prices and scandalous gossip and the anticipation of enjoyable social gatherings. But we still care about such topics enough to make statements about them. And every time we say anything, we promote our unique sentimentality, a set of values and things regarded as important. This action of promoting a particular way of interpreting or seeing or sorting out the world by what matters and what doesn't is inherent in the process of bringing any one topic to attention. If we talk about anything, there are things that we aren't talking about, and evidently the things that are talked about are important enough to the speaker to be mentioned.
Understanding that there is an assumed importance to anything said, an importance which is generally taken as self-evident or merely natural, we now have a new perspective with which to view literature. That is, we can analyze the inherent values and appreciate the particular subjectivity promoted in a work. But before we do that, let us consider the nature of fiction.
Fiction, whereas idle conversation generally comprises single statements or extremely rudimentary stories, is generally a more complex narrative, but is still fundamentally a story, something imagined and told by some author without the obvious practical uses of a calculus textbook or other nonfiction. But as with idle conversation, we can ask the same question: What is the point? Why do we tell stories? And the answer is our subjectivity.
TBC
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