[Icarus]

(04-27-2014 12:04 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

My impression of Ames himself is that he is an extremely literary guy in a way that is unpleasant to me; I find his writing in this passage annoying and bordering on cringe-worthy.

Your reply was quite interesting and it took me a few days to digest it.

Yet, I don't find Ames a particularly literary guy. The literary guy of the eXile crowd is doubtlessly John Dolan, also known as Gary Brecher, also known as The War Nerd. Dolan was Ames's teacher at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Dolan appears to be a man who read and wrote more than he lived, whereas Ames appears to be a man who lived more than he read and wrote. Both are well-read, of course, but Ames is (or was) a thrill-seeking adventurer with self-destructive tendencies, whereas Dolan is an intellectual and an academic at heart.

I don't think that the idea of the "Garden of Eden" is literary at all. A person can feel it without knowing what to call it. My own life experience suggests that humans are prone to believing that if only they had XYZ they would be happy and fulfilled. XYZ could be "hot girlfriend", or "millions of dollars in the bank", or "Ivy League pedigree", etc. It seems that life is always a bit grim, and people naturally seek solace by trying to "acquire" people (e.g., friends, admirers, romantic partners, sexual partners) or objects (e.g., cars, boats, houses). I don't think this is something that only literary people do. What literary people do is to ruin the experience by believing that they themselves are characters in some grand novel.