 | The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth. |
| I thought all these other people. I thought how did they get to be who they are. It’s banks and car parks. It’s airline tickets in their computers. It’s restaurants filled with people talking. It’s people signing the merchant copy. It’s people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their credit card in their wallet. This alone could do it. |
Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo
| ‘For me gravity doesn’t exist,’ said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms. |
In his paper, Dr. Verlinde never wrote “gravity doesn’t exist”. Instead, he wrote:
Note, however, that from our point of view the existence of gravity or closed strings is not assumed microscopically: they are emergent as an effective description. (“On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” PDF)
To say gravity doesn’t exist is one thing. To say it’s not real is something else. To say it’s an emergent phenomenon is yet another thing. In his New York Times essay, Dennis Overbye observes:
Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. He and his brother Herman, a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins known more for their mastery of the mathematics of hard-core string theory than for philosophic flights.
| We go through life mishearing and misseeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative. |
An excerpt taken from the fascinating (really) account of Mazoltuv Borukhova’s Trial. The way Malcolm’s puts it could be used, I think, to illustrate the existential implication of “cognitive dissonance”.
Janet Malcolm :
“(born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).” (wikipedia)
Previously on Skandalon: Michael Shaw
| Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and his partner Choi Mi-sun, 25, fed their three-month-old baby only on visits home between 12-hour sessions at a neighbourhood internet cafe, where they were raising an avatar daughter in a Second-Life-style game called Prius online, police said. Leaving their real daughter at their home in a suburb of Seoul to fend for herself, the pair, who were unemployed, spent hours role-playing in the virtual reality game, which allows users to choose a career and friends, granting them offspring as a reward for passing a certain level. The pair became obsessed with nurturing their virtual daughter, called Anima, but neglected their real daughter, who was not named. Eventually, the couple returned home after one 12-hour session in September to find the child dead and called police. The pair were arrested on Friday after an autopsy showed that the baby died from prolonged malnutrition. |
| Penser à ce que tu seras? Tes regrets n’ont pas d’avenir. Et nul avenir ne t’appartient. Le temps ne te fait plus de place, le temps enfante la peur. Et alors tu t’en va. En t’en allant, tu t’oublies. Et en marchant, tu es un autre – et en étant, tu n’es plus. |
This essay has yet to be translated in English. See Cioran’s bibliography on Cioran.eu.
