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The paradox of the misanthrope
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1. Hating makes the world worth holding. The possibility of feeling, alone, is enough to give rise to the notion that indifference is worse than hatred, less ennobled than love, proper, and lacking in any functionality. Indifference is useless to everyone.
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A proper lack of feeling being the most insipid notion available as a response to this world; it hurts more for the misanthrope to feel useless than for the lover to be unloved. This is what feeling amounts to: feeling it yourself.
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2. The crisis this paradox causes in the misanthrope is two-fold: it forces him to look at his own perceptions via his own lack, the psychology of which can be painful enough, allowing for moments of joy, even the joy caused by his own misanthropy, to be clouded with the notion that joy is possible; the hatred of mankind acts as a kind of hypnosis, devastating that joy to a rubble that pigeons wouldn’t even pick at for scraps.
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And a misanthrope loves a pigeon, as a symbol, especially.
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3. I walk today along the East River. It is winter, and therefore the park is less crowded and more sublime than what is apparent during the warmer months. The animal things – people included – are all but lacking in the frosty air and I stand still and watch the river flow by; I stand still, frozen, and a man jogging along with his dog, trailing slightly behind him, passes.
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I want to say to him that’s he’s practicing cruelty.
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The dog isn’t even wearing a sweater.
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4. In love with the tools that hate or disgust makes rapier use of? the tools that take their own toll on a person’s psyche? One needs both ends, otherwise there’s no sense, no end to anything. I sit here wearing a sweater and hating that I need to wear something that keeps me warm, having just paid my heating bill that does not keep me warm, and having paid dearly for it.
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But I am happy to have a home.
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5. I keep coming back to the bus: I love how there are ways that I can commute, no matter where I need to go, and get there, within a reasonable amount of time. But each morning, standing in line, I witness too many instances of others, thinking their approach to be personally ideal, cut into the line I’m standing in, pretending not to notice that there is a line at all. And no one bothers to even whisper a complaint.
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These assholes are too far out of reach of my voice unless I allow myself to stand there appearing to others to be a complete lunatic.
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I have been known to shoulder my back to the women who attempt such a thing in front of me, ignoring their own ignorance or malice.
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Their eyes always have a faux-daze look to them.
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No one could actually be so stupid as to not understand the nature of a line. There is pure malice involved here.
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6. On 6th Avenue, X was explaining to me his desire to drop out of society all together. That, or either fall in love. His eyes welling with emotion that left him sipping tea in great quantities to supplant the lost hydration, he told me how he had spent long enough in the dating scene, how his experiences made him feel not only lacking, but regretful of what people had become.
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He told me how, on one date, a girl had said to him “you’re a nice enough guy, but you just look too sad for me to date”.
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He had gone home and found an online hook-up to fuck “like crazy” and when they met that night, she arrived and after some initial cordials and making out told him “can you maybe brush your teeth?” at which point he told her she had to go.
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X told me that he regrets the needs of the body so much, the fucking, the eating, hell, even the breathing that he imagines the whole combination of needs to be some kind of cosmic joke.
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“Being in a coma sounds like the best way to live,” he said.
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His words were such that I thought to give him some advice to seek help, were that I didn’t feel similarly, from time to time.
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Instead, for myself, I take naps and feel less inclined to feel similarly.
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