Andrew

“It appears that the prostitute, not the salesman, best exemplifies the qualities indispensable to success in American society.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

“I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

“The self-consciousness that mocks all attempts at spontaneous
action or enjoyment derives in the last analysis from the waning
belief in the reality of the external world, which has lost its immediacy
in a society pervaded by "symbolically mediated information."
The more man objectifies himself in his work, the more
reality takes on the appearance of illusion. As the workings of the
modern economy and the modern social order become increasingly
inaccessible to everyday intelligence, art and philosophy
abdicate the task of explaining them to the allegedly objective sciences of society, which themselves have retreated from the effort
to master reality into the classification of trivia. Reality thus
presents itself, to laymen and "scientists" alike, as an impenetrable
network of social relations-as "role playing," the "presentation
of self in everyday life." To the performing self, the only
reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished
by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and
fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions,
all of them equally contemporaneous to the contemporary
mind.* In order to polish and perfect the part he has devised for
himself, the new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection, not so
much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of
fatigue, decay. Life becomes a work of art, while "the first art
work in an artist," in Norman Mailer's pronouncement, "is the
shaping of his own personality.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It