I've returned from floating around in my metaphysical universe to being a boy working retail in Pike Place Market while preparing his escape into the so-called real world. A lot has happened in my personal melodrama. But here I am again, spending a summer in Seattle, staring out at the world around me like a fish in a bowl. The academic year will start again soon, and with luck, I'll be motivated. This summer and the last year have been attempts to reinvigorate myself in the wake of a series of personal failures: relationships, scholarships, my personal health. I'll admit, I wallowed for a bit. I lathered myself with stupidity and let myself fester. Or, if seen in a more positive light, I've spent the last five months letting go of everything. I tried to practice hardline buddhist detachment in hopes that I might find something concrete.
At the end of this phenomenological journey, I found...myself. Only myself. I'm not talking about some kooky "self-finding spirit quest." I'm saying that in my four years at this undergraduate institution, I learned to accept help, to open myself to a community of dedicated individuals, to find friendship and connection despite overwhelming distances, a now, I'm back to the same lone wolf feeling that I had when I graduated from high school. The monotony of suburban California was fiercely isolating. Yet to accept the rigid definition of isolated alone-ness also denies the organicism of interrelation in any place. That is to say, even though I feel alone, I'm not really alone. (Even though that doesn't make me feel any better). So maybe the answer really is as Jean-luc Nancy describes. Maybe I am living in an "inoperative community" in which my society is "together" but "not-together." Or in more broad terms, I'm in limbo, and that's okay because everything is in limbo.
Totality and Infinity just starting to make more sense now. I guess that's how books like that work. The ideas only set in months or even years later.
good Others are hard to find. Maybe that's why alterity is so scary.
