May 2011
81 posts
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excrutiatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”
—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (via fishingboatproceeds)
“The Venn Diagram of guys who don’t like smart girls and guys you don’t want to date is a circle.”
—John Green (via papercrushed)
It’s empty in the valley of your heart,
The sun, it rises slowly as you walk,
Away from all the fears And all the faults you’ve left behind
I think I've broken my nose.
Little Lion Man
Mumford and Sons
Mumford & Sons - Little Lion Man
