dogearredpages’s Reviews > Television > Status Update

…I was thinking, if I were to die right now, on this deck, warm from the sun, I would probably be grateful for that sudden brush of wind because it cooled me off. Know what I mean? For a moment it would just be me and the wind. Then, just the wind.”

“And I was thinking that probably, just before you die, you don't see all the things you've done before. You don't see your life flashing beautifully before your eyes, all your loves and your mistakes curling over you like a deck of cards being bridged in the shuffle. Probably, I thought, you are right where you are and nothing that's happened seems to matter very much…

“…but the point of writing something was not to find a hole in the ground an fil it. The point was to carefully choose a place, dig a new hole there, and fill it so beautifully that a stranger passing by should think, ‘Thank God for whoever filled that hole, it was certainly empty for a long, long time.’”

“Even the atheists among us make heavens of our futures.”

…Promises. Hannah Ardent said that promises are our unique, human way of ordering the future. I would add to this, ordering the future is our unique, human way of dissociating from present misgivings.”

“But I only accepted that the future is illusory, I felt quite calm. I felt no pressure to find an answer. What answer was I looking for? Only a promise. A promise that I would be faithful or that she would accept me if I were not, all of this predicted on a promise that we would want to be together for years to come and that the world would not burn and everything would be roughly as it is today…

“It isn’t a modern pursuit. I should write TV.” “Anything is modern if you do it in the present.”

…A person of my generation was surrounded by choices and compelled to make them. And we were marketed to as though our preferences were evidence of our individuality, which was evidence of our aliveness…Were we more or less individualistic? More or less demo-cratic? Was this answerable?”

“A person of my generation was not limited to the sexual/romantic prospects in a given bar on a given night. Nor stores within driving distance, nor a social circle in the neighborhood, nor movies in stock on the shelves at the video rental…

“When I was young, I believed that love would be when another person became more interesting to me than I was. It didn’t occur to me that I might lose interest without a usurper.”