The modern objection is, if something is difficult, if something is tough, then you are going about things wrongly. Quick, get a pain pill or some mind-altering drug to sort it out.
I don't only not share the same values with modern people, but that my points of mental reference and ethical construction of reality are also completely different. The most basic difference is that I do not see difficulty as a sign of something being wrong. I do not see pain as an objection to any particular course of action. Should any agony be prolonged, certainly there is cause to reconsider whether other methods might be more viable. Discomfort itself is not an objection to anything.
I don't register discomfort as an undesirable state, but rather as a baseline of my own, personal normality. I grew up that way. Going to school in the rain, complying with the expectations of authorities -- all was intensely disquieting. These authorities tended to go in for making you a social spectacle if you had not complied with some mundane demand like doing your homework correctly.
It's not that I have any natural desire to accept a multitude of petty pains, but that the type of consciousness that rises above certain aspects of reality is very desirable and a pleasure to experience. What I may have lost in emotional sensitivity I have gained in life perspective. To put it differently, my capacity to experience life viscerally has been lifted to another level. Instead of experiencing the body and its pains, or sexual sensations, I find myself lifted to higher, aesthetic level of experience, by my inability to take small pains or difficulties seriously.
My appreciation of life is fundamentally non-personal and aesthetic. It's not that I push myself to the next level of experience, but that my reflexes do. I am in a sensual-aesthetic realm, where minor personal vicissitudes have no meaning.
I give my authoritarian school teachers credit for this. I also give credit to the Rhodesian cultural fetish of echoing the literary romantics of the late seventeenth century. When you do not feel your own personal feelings, perhaps because the authoritarian rigors of the education system don't permit it, your sensuality can still be absorbed in the literary-romantic realm; don't ask me to feel something you feel about others and your strange relationships with them, as I will often be distracted by the grandeur of reality itself.
I do feel a lot in terms of life and death sensations, but very little in relation to slight shifts in indications of distress. I move through this aesthetic level, to a level of awareness of a military style virility. Here all of reality seems soaked in excitement -- the earth given life by an outpouring of blood. Each stalk of grass trembling in the wind tells a tale. It lives because they died.
We have been spared.
We need to treat each centimeter of the sand as if it were holy.
These are my realities.
I experience a great deal of aesthetic turbulence, which I find glorious and distracting.
Psychological pain does not interest me much at all, comparatively.
I don't only not share the same values with modern people, but that my points of mental reference and ethical construction of reality are also completely different. The most basic difference is that I do not see difficulty as a sign of something being wrong. I do not see pain as an objection to any particular course of action. Should any agony be prolonged, certainly there is cause to reconsider whether other methods might be more viable. Discomfort itself is not an objection to anything.
I don't register discomfort as an undesirable state, but rather as a baseline of my own, personal normality. I grew up that way. Going to school in the rain, complying with the expectations of authorities -- all was intensely disquieting. These authorities tended to go in for making you a social spectacle if you had not complied with some mundane demand like doing your homework correctly.
It's not that I have any natural desire to accept a multitude of petty pains, but that the type of consciousness that rises above certain aspects of reality is very desirable and a pleasure to experience. What I may have lost in emotional sensitivity I have gained in life perspective. To put it differently, my capacity to experience life viscerally has been lifted to another level. Instead of experiencing the body and its pains, or sexual sensations, I find myself lifted to higher, aesthetic level of experience, by my inability to take small pains or difficulties seriously.
My appreciation of life is fundamentally non-personal and aesthetic. It's not that I push myself to the next level of experience, but that my reflexes do. I am in a sensual-aesthetic realm, where minor personal vicissitudes have no meaning.
I give my authoritarian school teachers credit for this. I also give credit to the Rhodesian cultural fetish of echoing the literary romantics of the late seventeenth century. When you do not feel your own personal feelings, perhaps because the authoritarian rigors of the education system don't permit it, your sensuality can still be absorbed in the literary-romantic realm; don't ask me to feel something you feel about others and your strange relationships with them, as I will often be distracted by the grandeur of reality itself.
I do feel a lot in terms of life and death sensations, but very little in relation to slight shifts in indications of distress. I move through this aesthetic level, to a level of awareness of a military style virility. Here all of reality seems soaked in excitement -- the earth given life by an outpouring of blood. Each stalk of grass trembling in the wind tells a tale. It lives because they died.
We have been spared.
We need to treat each centimeter of the sand as if it were holy.
These are my realities.
I experience a great deal of aesthetic turbulence, which I find glorious and distracting.
Psychological pain does not interest me much at all, comparatively.
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