Home and social commentary

In this post, I want to step out from behind the things I really love, and the things that have been the reason for this collection of notes, to talk about something I've thought about in smatterings while in Vienna.

For the past few days I've been living off 20 euros, a result of not having access to my bank account. After class ends at 1 in the afternoon, I've been coming home to cook myself pasta and pesto for lunch and dinner. To avoid spending any money at all I've just stayed in my room. Yesterday I allowed myself the luxury of a beer bought from the grocery store while watching The Sound of Music for the nth time. There are only so many hours you can sit through Dostoevtsky and old letters and Rilke.

This is not a response to an article or anyone in particular. It's a reflection on my time at home. In that time, there were a few conversations that I remember. Mostly, they were with people who will be reading this. Every other conversation I had with the rest of my friends, peers, colleagues seem to be coagulating into a badly deformed mass resembling a person raising his fist at something. A few things we talked about were the scholarship system, the housing system, our government, China, God, finance, our schools, working in our country. The list could go on, but probably not for very long.

We extrapolate, as things go, I could be doing this and being this, in ten years. We hypothesize, he didn't do this because this happened. We sympathize, she should have known this was going to happen. We laugh when someone makes a quip about someone else running after a cashbox. We proselytize, do you really want to be that sort of human? We are pained, look at how hard they work us, and look at what they are doing to us. We appraise and assess, this is not the right time for us to expect to be who we want to be. We ruminate, this is my calculated sacrifice, this is my best shot at life. We denounce the world, there is nothing good in it. We celebrate the world, there is this much we want from it, I can tell you all about it. We dream and not dream at the same time.

I have an impression that when we make, or are recipient to incessant reflections on how things are done, how they should be done, we make ever more unshakable the sense of ourselves in our own society. We magnify ourselves above the people we're speaking for. We grovel ever closer to the soil of our very hearts, repeating the question 'Will I be happy?', and receive the ever more resounding answer, 'I must be, I have to be'.

Social commentary is not social action.