"Something Lyrical for the Night" and experience
“Something Lyrical for the Night” and experience.
I heard a few words on You Tube recently that got me thinking about what is true and what is not. I was listening to a presentation by Noam Chomsky, the leftist academic who stands out as one of the foremost intellectuals of our time. A young man in the audience said ‘how can you say we are slaves to capitalism when we live so much better now than we did in the past.’ Chomsky pointed out that there were advancements made to the conditions of slaves during the late 1800’s too. “They were better off. They were still slaves.”
We value our political and economic freedoms more than almost any possessions we may have. Warren Buffet has said that the thing that sets America apart and above other countries is that we have a terrific system. This might seem to be a direct repudiation of Noam Chomsky. It’s far beyond my personal intellectual scope to actually know whether we are slaves to a system or the beneficiaries of it. But that may be part of the problem for Max, the protagonist in “Something Lyrical for the Night.” He says, for example, “How do you choose, between reality and illusion, when both of them are true?”
That book is not really about truth or illusion. It’s about the personal struggle to find a way to live in a world that is so twisted that the truth lies somewhere within a contradiction. This is probably not a strictly modern phenomenon; it has probably always been true. Max is just one more person to take the trip through insanity to, perhaps, some ragged form of illumination.
Noam Chomsky
I heard a few words on You Tube recently that got me thinking about what is true and what is not. I was listening to a presentation by Noam Chomsky, the leftist academic who stands out as one of the foremost intellectuals of our time. A young man in the audience said ‘how can you say we are slaves to capitalism when we live so much better now than we did in the past.’ Chomsky pointed out that there were advancements made to the conditions of slaves during the late 1800’s too. “They were better off. They were still slaves.”
We value our political and economic freedoms more than almost any possessions we may have. Warren Buffet has said that the thing that sets America apart and above other countries is that we have a terrific system. This might seem to be a direct repudiation of Noam Chomsky. It’s far beyond my personal intellectual scope to actually know whether we are slaves to a system or the beneficiaries of it. But that may be part of the problem for Max, the protagonist in “Something Lyrical for the Night.” He says, for example, “How do you choose, between reality and illusion, when both of them are true?”
That book is not really about truth or illusion. It’s about the personal struggle to find a way to live in a world that is so twisted that the truth lies somewhere within a contradiction. This is probably not a strictly modern phenomenon; it has probably always been true. Max is just one more person to take the trip through insanity to, perhaps, some ragged form of illumination.
Noam Chomsky
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