Flake

In 1870, during the upheaval presaging the Franco-Prussian War, George Sand described to Flaubert her achievement of serenity at last in old age: “I’d sown my volcanoes with grass and flowers, and they were getting on well.”

Writing, I stumble over myself more than ever. I’m afraid my own serenity won’t hold, and so I’m reluctant to waste time picking out words.Contradictions arise naturally from the human sensibility, appearing as urges to check one’s line of thought: intellectual stammering. I worry that my own peaks and troughs are of a different order. They have the tenor of manic compulsion I associate with mental illness. It’s one thing to have mood swings, but it’s hard work being discomfited by your own happiness because you detect the seed of decline in it. Lately stress and squalor are attended by familiarity and security, while inspiration, which I lived off once, comes only with an ominous taint. But why all this fuss over happiness?, the intellectual wants to know. After all, what would make me happier than to finish tracing out my system of thought, finally and conclusively, in all its barbed, pitiable wretchedness?

Drinking doesn’t help. Cigarettes don’t, either. Smoking in particular is bad for your short-term mental health because it requires a forceful self-delusion to carry out. You have to suppress the healthy logic of mortality and life’s continuity—the philosophical corollary of any addiction.

The [plangent] question is not ‘Why do people practice self-destructive behaviors,’ since sufficient explanations are obvious and ready-to-hand, but ‘Why is life on earth such': Why do we find ourselves living according to imposed conditions of being and of conscious experience, and made to hunt for clues to the nature of our over-determined self-destructiveness. It is demanded of us that we answer the question, Why does life appear at odds with living, and then the demand has been accompanied at turns with strains of the profound, tragic, comic, or felicitous.

To combat these practices: It’s to ask, Why does life seem to be at odds with living. (‘Life does not live.’) Life is just a shining chip embedded in death, a flake (say, in cool hematite).

Adverse conditions. Hardship, danger. Inhuman forces trying to rub out the bright stain of life and free will.