inwit
He types:
The single word facebook post: Haiti. The reconstruction of the steps that this takes. The electronic immortality of the post.
But he can’t think of what else to say, let alone a title for the post. Armenians or the Albanians. But that’s too long a story to tell. And why bother? He has lost access both to sanctimony and its self-reflexive inversion. Or so it seems, fleetingly.
Instead he putters in his now usual morning circles – a cigarette outside, coffee, email, repeat. All the while he is resolving to resolve to be more efficient in the mornings – to be out the door or at least at work on something within an hour of waking.
Perhaps if, upon waking each morning, he turned on the television news, that would give him a better sense of time, would moor his mornings against the world outside, and he would get out the door more swiftly.
Then he writes his own facebook post, a link to a book review that he has written for a magazine.
ads without products 
In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday night. She’s not beautiful, mocked, cursed and disowned by all. But don’t get it wrong: she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind.
For there’s a rule and an exception.
Culture is the rule, and art is the exception.
Everybody speaks the rule: cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war.
Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it’s written: Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It’s composed: Gershwin, Mozart. It’s painted: Cezanne, Vermeer. It’s filmed: Antonioni, Vigo.
Or it’s lived, and then it’s the art of living: Srebenica, Mostar, Sarajevo.
The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for Cultural Europe is to organize the death of the art of living, which still flourishes.
When it’s time to close the book, I’ll have no regrets.
I’ve seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well.
Dave
January 14, 2010 at 1:18 pm