Unattractive Afterthought
This is not going to make me any friends, but as those reading this are already my friends, and I know you are mostly as bad (or perhaps as good) as I am, it may not lose me any either. For starters, are we agreed that a few people one doesn't like much are a fact of life? I do hope so. For twice yesterday I was in a position to notice how exciting it is to discover enemies in common. Positively devilishly fun. Watch me parse this delicious sensation to show that it's an improving reflection and not just further evidence of my oneway ticket to the Inferno. Or possibly the reverse.
Enmity is of course far more personally revealing and risky than amity: the special few to whom this feeling applies push much more intimate buttons than the many nice people to whom it doesn't, so that outing yourself as an X-hater gives a momentary thrill of recognition and then of inner badness exposed. Then there's the exhilirating danger factor: potential blabbers will render you friendless or jobless in two shakes of a lamb's tail. In addition it's a huge relief to realise someone will both gladly unburden you of your long-nurtured bile and allow you an opportunity to showcase any hilarious but vicious rhetoric you may have been storing up (there's no appeal like vanity). Thirdly, it has a scrumptious rarity value, since for all that it is achingly enjoyable not even I, a person with markedly limited reserves of temperantia, find many politic opportunities to indulge in it. Still, one mostly belives one has a good reason for disliking people, and it is most satisfactory to have the impression, as it were, ratified. This process, irrationally but delightfully, makes one believe that the overwhelming disdain or detestation is a verifiable and justifiable observation of fact.
Oh, and of course people's shortcomings are so much more hugely entertaining than their virtues; in which connection I can at least say in my defence that I am far more forthcoming with stories against myself than against anyone else.
Yes, I'm horrible. But not about any of you.
Enmity is of course far more personally revealing and risky than amity: the special few to whom this feeling applies push much more intimate buttons than the many nice people to whom it doesn't, so that outing yourself as an X-hater gives a momentary thrill of recognition and then of inner badness exposed. Then there's the exhilirating danger factor: potential blabbers will render you friendless or jobless in two shakes of a lamb's tail. In addition it's a huge relief to realise someone will both gladly unburden you of your long-nurtured bile and allow you an opportunity to showcase any hilarious but vicious rhetoric you may have been storing up (there's no appeal like vanity). Thirdly, it has a scrumptious rarity value, since for all that it is achingly enjoyable not even I, a person with markedly limited reserves of temperantia, find many politic opportunities to indulge in it. Still, one mostly belives one has a good reason for disliking people, and it is most satisfactory to have the impression, as it were, ratified. This process, irrationally but delightfully, makes one believe that the overwhelming disdain or detestation is a verifiable and justifiable observation of fact.
Oh, and of course people's shortcomings are so much more hugely entertaining than their virtues; in which connection I can at least say in my defence that I am far more forthcoming with stories against myself than against anyone else.
Yes, I'm horrible. But not about any of you.
posted by Scarlet at 5:22 am
1 Comments:
there's that wonderful punch cartoon of two people leaving a party, both with constipated expressions. the woman is addressing the man. "Isn't it wonderful how we both loathe the same people?"
read travels in the scriptorium, by paul auster. your mother will, and she'll love it, with minor reservations about its slightly too abstract style. Bxx
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