The French Revolution

I wake every morning with the feeling that something good is going to happen, having set my watch by this feeling, waking up sometime between 5:30 am and the few minutes just before the sun goes down.

The first thing I do is pull up the blinds and look out the window. The sky, having survived both the day and the night, is always there, not a cloud in it. Then, a moment or two later, I see all the old questions are in the process of being replaced by the new questions, but that the old questions keep coming back in the reign of terror that is reality.

With the precision of this vagueness I know exactly how I feel, I just can’t put it into words though I keep trying—we now live in a world of semi-satisfying diversions, little fictions that help the time go by as pleasantly as possible while not inflicting unmanageable pain, where terror can only be dispelled by the presence of young children or a close re-reading of Freud’s ‘Civilization and Its Discontents.’

In her very small book, her last, ‘On the Abolition of All Political Parties,’ Simone Weil writes, ‘In the Anglo-Saxon world, political parties have an element of game, of sport, which is only conceivable in an institution of aristocratic origin, whereas in institutions that were plebian from the start, everything must always be serious.’

from Los Angeles Times, Feb. 9, 2022.