We encountered the term “theory of mind” in passing in the previous chapter in relation to apes. Now let me explain it more fully. It is a technical term that is widely used in the cognitive sciences, from philosophy to primatology to clinical psychology. It refers to your ability to attribute intelligent mental beingness to other people: to understand that your fellow humans behave the way they do because (you assume) they have thoughts, emotions, ideas, and motivations of more or less the same kind as you yourself possess. In other words, even though you cannot actually feel what it is like to be another individual, you use your theory of mind to automatically project intentions, perceptions, and beliefs into the minds of others. In so doing you are able to infer their feelings and intentions and to predict and influence their behavior. Calling it a theory can be a little misleading, since the word “theory” is normally used to refer to an intellectual system of statements and predictions, rather than in this sense, where it refers to an innate, intuitive mental faculty.
(via wildcat2030)
Sometimes I don’t know why anything requires a greater significance than what exists in the simple witnessing of it. An event could mean so many things. To discern one in particular comes at the exclusion of any number of alternates. Once assigned, a given meaning runs risk of holding sway over others, for various reasons at our disposal. What then is said of life experience? What has been experienced? What has been excluded? What has stopped short before ever taking off? What is it to have a narrative? To be a narrative?
‘I adore you because you made me a whore.’
Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love. And something else that from that time on would be her reason for living: he convinced her that one comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them for whatever reason, one’s own or someone else’s, willingly or unwillingly, loses them forever.
By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flintstonized their way right into a cul-de-sac. Modern man’s seemingly instinctive impulse to control women’s sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response to specific historical socioeconomic conditions—conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to understanding sexuality in the modern world.
Sometimes it feels as though being a person is a relentless effort at keeping everything together. Other times it is an ongoing acceptance of how infinitely everything comes apart.
I was spending some time earlier today watching smoke trail up from the glowing ember of an incense stick. It dawned on me that life is like that. Paths twist and change, are born and die, evaporate over time into thin air. The more I attach to a path the less I recognize my true place as its origin, where I am still glowing, creating new paths all the time.
Compared to the grand sweep and romance of Jack London’s life, my existence seemed like a squirrel with its head against a walnut, dozing until spring.
I’m writing this letter in a tiny room at a tiny desk near a tiny bed next to a tiny bookcase beside a tiny closet, none of which have the slightest decorative touch, and all of which are designed to meet the minimum functional requirements. On the desk is a fluorescent lamp, a teacup, the stationary for writing this letter, and a dictionary. To be honest, I almost never use the dictionary. I just don’t like dictionaries. I don’t like the way they look, and I don’t like what they say inside. Whenever I use a dictionary, I make a face and think, Who needs to know that? Say I look up “transition” and it says: “passage from one state to another.” I think, So what? It’s got nothing to do with me. So when I see a dictionary on my desk I feel like I’m looking at some strange dog leaving a twisty piece of poop on our lawn out back.
Didn’t want to be your ghost
Didn’t want to be anyone’s ghost
Didn’t want to be your ghost
Didn’t want to be anyone’s ghost
But I don’t want anybody else
I don’t want anybody else
Pithy.
