By Michel Houellebecq
"The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situation—similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of demotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasks—and these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days."
"I don’t mean that my sketches were unfunny; they were funny. I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality: we had simplified and pruned so much, broken so many barriers, taboos, misplaced hopes, and false aspirations; truly, there was so little left."
Started reading this one. My first Houellebecq.
As I read through, it taps on one of my ongoing thoughts -- if one were to be born somewhere, anywhere in the world as anyone, is this world a happy place? Where I wonder about a few hundred miles west from say, where I was born, the Muslim Arab being female in such places, to even the modern west and if you read Houellebecq. I am glad happy and grateful for what I am and where I am with all my pros and cons and good and bad and nice and nasty. The world one would like -- one hopes that it balances for a being between one’s world view and circumstances of one’s life. That there is an inherent teleological balance which is not visible to an outsider. That one makes do with one’s life and that statement I utter about myself perhaps most human beings can utter about themselves... one can only wonder.
The only thing in the Michel H novels is the sense of sadness, lostness, unhappiness with life. When all is revealed and no mystery left. One then feels grateful for this universe that even if on earth, we seem to find ourselves out of sync with existential questions and somehow erased wonders about humanity, an ennui, regarding the universe and our existence, we are still in a sacred mystery. May it never be revealed. May the bubble of existence keep floating till one lives, as Borges says, time and space like mirror when lit.
only life is real.
Space and time are its shapes,
the mind's magical modes,
and when life burns out,
space, time, and death go out with it,
as when light fails
the image in the mirror fails,
One of my other overarching thoughts is about consumption economy and man being a mimetic creature, now seems to have copied those short term values, a consumption, use and throw approach to life and its relations too. Perhaps there is the source of our unhappiness. When we consume, use and throw we satisfy the shallow parts of our selves. But when we commit, irrespective, a sort of lifelong avowal to certain few things or relations, then somehow we are able to access deeper parts of us which a use and throw world cannot reach. Somehow life grows to the circumstances it finds itself in. And by constantly giving it the short term easy outs, one just lives on surface, surrounded by the consumption driven images of modern world. Even a little deeper is satisfaction, peace, tranquility and somehow a dissolution of existential questions, as if there’s no need, as if one finds oneself in the fountain, the sacred fount which is all answers.
Strange paradox of life and living. Words too are surface. Words though at times open doors, but one needs to walk through. It is in the living, the being and the becoming.
