A Lament for the Solid World of the Bourgeoisie

The great object of life is Sensation-to feel that we exist-even though in pain-it is this 'craving void' which drives us to Gaming-to Battle-to Travel-to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.
---Byron's Letters and Journals, vol. 3, p109

There is nothing more depressing, nothing more deflating, than a visit to a shopping mall-except, perhaps, being unaware of its utter nullity or, God forbid, actually shopping there! Like an airport or a waiting lounge, these are non-places, no-place-like-home. I brush past other zombies and listen to the announcement of some special deal. This, then, is the life of the Eloi. God forgive us.

I think we'll look back at the solid world of the bourgeoisie with some nostalgia. At least they possessed something, had something. They still managed to live in a world and knew the value of masks and hypocrisy, knew something of the attachments to work, family, and place that are necessary for civilised conduct. Compared to the wares of the 99 pence shops and the endless amounts of plastic, gaudy junk that floats our way, unceasingly, via the South Pacific and that is ultimately destined for the heaps of rubbish, there is something to be said for the simple and enduring pleasures of a previous generation. The fanaticism of the fundamentalist is not too dissimilar to that of the hedonist: in both there is detachment from reality and a flight to the imaginary.

Bourgeois conformity, middle class norms and conventions, the daily rhythms and patterns of a life-not very exciting or noble, I know-are still to be infinitely preferred to this unbearable lightness of being. One wonders if the whole problem of western life isn't to ensure that pleasure doesn't become unhinged from "the good", doesn't descend (with the help of the imagination) into an endless whirl of desire and frivolity. How to be open and still not shallow, trivial?

[Is Chopin at this balancing point? On the verge of sliding into the most banal sentimentality]

Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
----Hannah Arendt.


Forever inflamed and dissatisfied, his spirit will go abroad in the world, the busy industrious world. ; it will go abroad, I tell to you, like a whore yelling: Plasticity! Plasticity! Plasticity has poisoned him, yet he can't live without his poison now. He has banished reason from his heart...The happiest thing that can happen to him is that nature strike him with a terrifying call to order. And such, in fact, is the law of life: he who refuses the joy of honest activity can feel nothing but the terrible joys of vice...

The immoderate pleasure he takes in form will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses. Swallowed up this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque, ..the notions of the true and the just will disappear. The frenetic passion for art is a cancer that eats up everything else..excessive specialization in a single faculty can only end up in emptiness.
---Baudelaire, from Roberto Calasso's 'Literature and the Gods'

This is the emanicpation of the aesthetic-Nietzsche's aesthetic justification of life. The Beautiful becomes free from the True, just as art becomes autonomus: art for art's sake! and reason, too, loses any necessary relation to the Good. And yet, the strangest of things is happening: these freedoms are morphing into compulsions and vicious circles so that we are, quite literally speaking, becoming slaves of our desires.

Not knowing or able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves....taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge their, exploring them like large unknown territories.
---Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'

From Calasso:

'But the supreme beauty, nay the supreme order, is still and only the beauty of chaos, and to be precise, of a chaos waiting only for the contact or love to open into a world of harmony, like the world of ancient mythology and ancient poetry'.

The problem for the Romantics was that whilst evoking the name of the gods they realised that they had to remember the communities and the world in which they felt at home. That world was no more-who now talks of the "muddy centre"? But if the world has disappeared, the spirit that fired their aspirations hasn't. The problem, then, for the Romantics (and all rebels) is that they are desert wanderers without a qibla.

If everything is "constructed," then why give oneself to one myth? This is the paralysis and uncertainty of modern times (and , incidentally, why all serious questions are answered in anon-serious way: power, technology or utility). The world itself has become a spectacle, insubstantial. Without Reality 'Appearance' also loses its charm. Everything 'given' is now but a wandering fragment (Van Gogh's shoes). Nothing is sacred and everything can be questioned, ridiculed or analysed. And because it can, so it is; worse than that: so it must be.