The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.

An ad that pretends to be art is - at absolute best - like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

...loneliness is not a function of solitude.