Growing up in a small town, I had an audience. I knew everyone at church, at school, on opposing sports teams. Everyone else knew everyone, too. Thus we were all one another’s audience. This did not always make life pleasant; one had an audience for one’s failures as well as one’s successes. But it made life meaningful. Everything counted because someone was watching. In high school, the bliss of getting a pretty girlfriend consisted less in having the girl herself than in walking the halls with her on your arm, for others to see. The chief motivation to score goals in sports was not to beat the other team but to impress the fans. To score a goal or get a girl on a desert island would have been a paltry pleasure. Small town life resembled the medieval universe in which saints and angels looked down on the adventures of humankind. Your actions might lead to heaven or hell, but because all eyes were on you, even damnation possessed a certain coziness.
September 2012
3 posts
On Being Nothing →
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
“You could now select the gay people you wanted to associate with before you met them. You didn’t have to expose yourself to folks who might have more experience of gay life than you did. You could hang on to your unliberated, heterosexist, macho prejudices, your denial, your fear. You could continue to subscribe to your ideal model of a good homosexual: someone virtuous, virile, self-respecting, dignified, “non-scene,” nonpromiscuous, with a conventional outlook and a solid attachment to traditional values—a proper citizen and an upstanding member of (straight) society.”
—“How to be Gay”, The Chronicle Review
“When scientists, philosophers, and other commentators speak of the real world, they’re talking about a myth, a convenient fiction. The world is a construct the brain builds based on the sensory information it’s given, and the information is only a small part of all that’s available.”
—
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, p. 304
