cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
ANGELS
Recovery model research indicates that the top predictor of people’s ability to find their way back from prolonged mental illness to a meaningful life is a relationship with at least one person who’s never lost sight of the human being beneath the illness.
— Kevin Anderson, “Dark Passage,” Psychotherapy Networker
WRITING
You are working on a first draft and small wonder you’re unhappy. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.
— John McPhee
YOUNG PEOPLE
An obstacle to implementing any response to content overload is that one can retreat into a position of indifference. Young people experience a world where nothing can be done. They sense that society is falling apart and nothing will change. [Mark Fisher, in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism] correlates the impotence to widespread pathologization, foreclosing the possibility of politicization. “Many of the teenage students I encountered,” Fisher writes, “seemed to be in a state of depressive hedonia, constituted by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.” Young people respond to the freedom that post-disciplinary systems offer “not by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana.”
— Geert Lovink, Networks without a Cause
SEX
Nothing is more real than sex when it is happening, nothing more illusory when it has just ended.
— Dan Chiasson
DESIRE
God gave us desire. Letting go of desire is not the way to peace or godliness. Rather desire is God’s way of making sure we join the parade rather than watching from the curb.
It’s okay to want a bigger TV but no one ever made a movie about a man who finally bought a Volvo. So embrace your desire but ask yourself whether your desire saves lives or whether it all goes with you to the grave.
The problem with your desires may be lack of meaning. Love is a common, but not the only, factor that adds meaning to otherwise boring desires.
— Don Miller
another eye opens 