The most terrifying thing in here might be being digested by modern bureaucracy. So few have avoided this fate. But maybe I think this because so many of my nightmares are written by Weber, Burnham, Kafka, and Gogol.
On a happier note, I find digestion metaphors useful and powerful, especially when it comes to ideas and emotions. The GI tract brings things to earth, maybe, and I like to spend time chewing my cud despite not being a ruminant.
You reminded me of a moment in Nabokov's *Pnin* when Pnin, whose English isn't quite idiomatic, is browsing through some books and says, "Excuse me, I only am grazing."
Thank you for this. I have often felt those same fears, shaped by the same writers. Kafka and Gogol especially. I partially use the digestive metaphors because their visceral grounding gives the lie to some of the pretenses of cerebral perfectibility that underlie those fears. The more I learn about agricultural history, the more I confirm for myself that totalitarian state control has very hard limits past which it destroys itself with famine in the short term and desertification in the long term. It doesn't require powerful human political opposition to defeat – ecology itself rejects it.
And I didn't know "grazing" was bad English! I remember using both "browsing" and "grazing" where I grew up, and we almost certainly weren't getting that from Nabokov in the Florida panhandle. I had a funny transition to the North going to college, definitely felt like an out of place immigrant sometimes.
The most terrifying thing in here might be being digested by modern bureaucracy. So few have avoided this fate. But maybe I think this because so many of my nightmares are written by Weber, Burnham, Kafka, and Gogol.
On a happier note, I find digestion metaphors useful and powerful, especially when it comes to ideas and emotions. The GI tract brings things to earth, maybe, and I like to spend time chewing my cud despite not being a ruminant.
You reminded me of a moment in Nabokov's *Pnin* when Pnin, whose English isn't quite idiomatic, is browsing through some books and says, "Excuse me, I only am grazing."
Thank you for this. I have often felt those same fears, shaped by the same writers. Kafka and Gogol especially. I partially use the digestive metaphors because their visceral grounding gives the lie to some of the pretenses of cerebral perfectibility that underlie those fears. The more I learn about agricultural history, the more I confirm for myself that totalitarian state control has very hard limits past which it destroys itself with famine in the short term and desertification in the long term. It doesn't require powerful human political opposition to defeat – ecology itself rejects it.
And I didn't know "grazing" was bad English! I remember using both "browsing" and "grazing" where I grew up, and we almost certainly weren't getting that from Nabokov in the Florida panhandle. I had a funny transition to the North going to college, definitely felt like an out of place immigrant sometimes.