notes

notes

A disconcerting question strikes me alarmingly often these days. I’ll be out in the world, and I’ll see something … let’s call it picturesque. Say I’m walking along a nature trail as a white wall of fog avalanches over a ridge, down a canyon of pine and oak, toward the blue waters of the Bay. I will find myself thinking, “My god, that is beautiful.” And then — even if I manage to keep my phone in my pocket, resisting what’s become a powerful instinct to reach for it — I will feel a strange tremor of uncertainty: “Am I looking at a screen right now?” I wonder.

...

In the moment, this uncertainty is not fully articulated, nor, thankfully, does it emerge from some extreme delusional state where I’ve lost my hold on reality. It’s more of a pre-cognitive kind of category confusion. And at the core of the confusion is this: As my life has come to consist so overwhelmingly, and for so many years, of looking at images on screens — and of looking at the world through a camera, which is also a phone, which is also a screen — the distinction for me between the screen and the non-screen can wobble.

...

(An excerpt from Knausgaard's My Struggle series)

…we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read books anymore; if there was a newspaper around I would prefer to read that. And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us and set things in motion, for that is how it is, the world is always the same, it is the way we view it that changes.