Why do I read? Is it to learn something, to make life more manageable? More comprehensible? To supplant the unknown with knowledge, affording a sense of personal growth and inner peace? Perhaps I read for the wrong reasons. Perhaps I need words to make me wobbly. To interrupt, disrupt, and disturb me. To deconstruct a false sense of safety I have acquired over the years through a plethora of placebos I cannot possibly count. Kierkegaard believed the task of the author was not to make things easier for the reader but more difficult. When I am comfortable there is little impetus for change. When I am made uncomfortable, fault lines appear, and the stage is set for unearthing. Agitation is the condition for the possibility of authentic becoming. Introduce a little chaos into the equation, a touch of tomfoolery into the plan, and things will tend to go awry. But were things ever going according to plan anyway? And if so, whose plan? Is not my life more like a Plan B, or C, or D, only fractionally mine, and something quite removed from a menagerie of dreams now lost to time? Where would I be, and who would I be, without the frictions that have formed me? Words I have received over the years that remain with me still are not only pleasing but uneasy. Words have staying power. Words are not just words. Words are deeds, as Wittgenstein pointed out, with a performative ability to both soothe and vex, assuage and unsettle, comfort and distress. If I prefer only the former, distrusting the disturbing, covering the confusing, and always evading the agitating, I risk becoming a husk of a human, albeit a very pleasant one. A bothered mind is an engaged mind, and the spirit stirred up is already free of complacency.
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