[b]Stephanie Danler
There’s no word for it in English. Like tristesse, flâneur, or la douleur exquise, words full of gray. The French do ambiguity so much better than Americans. Our language relies on fixedness because that’s what the market demands. A commodity must always be identifiable.[/b]
Start here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ethics_of_Ambiguity
Then reconfigure this philosophy into a particular world: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_of_Others
You will see it coming. Not you actually because you don’t see for yourself yet, everyone is busy seeing for you, days filled with unsolicited advice you don’t take and trite warnings you can’t hear and the whitewashing of all your excitement. Yes, they definitely saw it coming, exactly the way it came. When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident. Maybe everyone is when they’re young. They don’t remember, nobody remembers what it feels like to be so recklessly absorbent. When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.
I never saw it coming, that’s for sure. But [from what I can tell] most of you still don’t.
You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.
Let’s try to pin down why.
So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.
Not counting the ones in the supermarket that taste like soggy cardboard.
I didn’t know what a date was and I wasn’t an anomaly. Most of the girls I knew didn’t get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination.
After all, we are civilized now.
You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night?
Let’s ponder how Baby Jake might explain it.