And yet the older I get, the less this seems to be true. If anything, I keep finding myself among more and more oddities. Is this just a specific circle of circumstances? Well, yes. But the fact that such a circle exists, and is wide enough for my dumb ass to wander into it suggests, at the very least a strong counternarrative. I'd call it the world's shittiest Bloomsbury Set, because I think that's funny, but that does devalue people I value, so let's call it “the world's shittiest Bloomsbury Set” in especially large quotation marks. And the circumstances I find myself in which are also more and more curated in their weirdness, whether that is a particularly strange book I seek out, or whether that is a relationship with someone it seems I would have a decent enough time drowning together with.
Hence the chance encounters that leave one with dawn goodbyes, after a night of hearing stories about how their Lexapro isn't working anymore, about their sexual inadequacies, about the looming abysses that lie ahead... It's temping to think that the times have gotten themselves stranger. But that's not exactly a quantifiable thing, now. It seems to be, and we've probably all said it – shit has gotten weird. But I have to think that to a certain degree, the reason I wind up in the places I do, with the people I do, is a symptom of a certain neomania.
This seems not to be a particularly widespread term. Perhaps it ought to be.
I think it's self-explanatory. I could say something about Blaise Pascal blaming all of humanity's problems on man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And the way in which I slowly feel myself finding that room alone increasingly frightening, about the way in which the cracks in the ceiling paint seem to taunt me, the way in which my sofa cushions are increasingly rough, as if I'm trapped in an edifice waiting for it to collapse around me.
Or a certain Macedonian and his fear of there being no more lands left to conquer.
Maybe this is why I pore over things obsessively. My lists of books to read, movies to watch, recipes and restaurants try, imaginary trips. And this is why I rarely reread books, rewatch movies, go back to the same restaurants, visit the same city twice. It's always have to try this, have to try this, have to make sure I sample the whole goddamn buffet. Maybe this is why I feel the compulsive need to always keep moving.
“Ennui” is what you call being bored when it's supposed to be meaningful boredom.
And maybe it's a symptom of the condition whereby for, as long as I can remember, something just felt intrinsically wrong about the moment I found myself in (at the risk of sounding like I'm in a group therapy session for troubled teens). Because it does sound childish, doesn't it? It's the sort of #notliketheothergirls attitude that is far less attractive to others after one's mid-20s. You're supposed to, at some point, find your tribe, and then we're told things get better from there. But do they?
“It was a good enough performance as far as performances go” – Saint Joan of Brentwood
Beyond personal social failings, the human passion for neomania has a tendency – as Pascal alluded to -- to lead to bad shit. It has a tendency to lead to strenuous days and hazy nights and worse mornings, an infinite number of pregnancy scares and maudlin weeping, 3 a.m. cocaine breakfast clubs turning to 11 a.m. cocaine shits and screamingly dehydrated hangovers, every miserable gray Sunday twilight, and every other thing that seems one more step on the path towards a miniature and highly personalized day of the locust. And these are of course far, far, from the worst set of outcomes, at the levels of either personal or social wellbeing.
“He didn't mean to be rude, but at first glance this man seemed an exact model for the kind of person who comes to California to die.” – Nathanael West, writing about an Iowan. Of course he was.
But I have to think that this isn't just a personal failing, but – being the historical materialist good boy that I am – a product of conditions. To a certain degree, this is life at this particular wilting moment of late-stage capitalism, after the end of the monoculture. When all information is available, and everything is a niche of one sort or another, collecting all the Pokemon seems to be a natural step.
Even the individual lines from T.S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men” have become unbearable cliches.
But that's the social dimension of life after the ostensible end of history. There's also the psychic dimension, the sort of Mark Fisher despair that comes with living in a world in which the future has been inevitably postponed, and the futures that are there seem grim. At the end of the Roman Empire, the educated young men either drank the last drops of garum and silphium and Liburnian olive oil and plowed their catamites in a final orgiastic purge, or they perched themselves on top of the ruins that dotted the Syrian desert. And in another moment of panic in the 1930s, there were the mustachioed playboys who drank Champagne with chorus girls as their fathers' companies entered receivership, and there were the jobless flagpole sitters trying to win the AM radio prize.
“As we get older the difference between freedom and loneliness is often only differentiated by the quality of the light” – Achewood
The inverse of neomania is the moment when there is no more newness. There is only the past. And that's fucking terrifying. Dave passes through the multicolored vortex, and he's left, wrinkled, in his Baroque chamber, before the black monolith appears at the foot of his bed, an eerie glow to the floor.
I'm haunted by dreams I have of everyone I've hurt, standing ankle deep in running water, light flickering on the mottled surface.
And I'm haunted by the thought of a future, each irrational hope having slowly evaporated, orange light pouring in through the smeared window, as I sit in my leather armchair, my breathing hoarse, a cat across my ankles, remembering a time when I once thought there was something beyond the horizon.
What black monolith will I see?
