The Things You Find On The Internet
Range from the most depressingly familiar attitudes towards the basest things in the world to the most sincere and heartfelt expressions of human beings.
An example of the basest things: (don’t click if you’re under 18)
Now, there are things about the site I don’t think so bad and there are things I do think so bad. I don’t think it’s so bad to discuss sex in very explicit terms, though I tend to think people who do this too much are both consumed by a single part of life (I view them with the exact attitude I view horribly obese people) and overly consciously examining a part of life best left to personal experimentation. I know other people will say, “but, you would never discover as much if you don’t talk about it with other people,” and that’s certainly true. I think, though, what you discover is not so important as the process of discovery in this subject. Sex is not math: we don’t need to build an ever-increasing repertoire of concepts most will never employ. The sexual theory of semi-groups doesn’t need to be discovered.
Then again, maybe I am just too happy with too little in this respect. (Cleary not in others.)
In contrast, the nonchalant tone with which brothels are analyzed is a little disturbing to me. It’s the perfect example of the theme of a conversation I had with my friend Johannes the other night: the threshold to any behavior goes down with repeated performance. This part of the brain’s fundamental mechanisms towards the feeling of comfort are completely amoral and hence completely admissible to use by, let’s say, questionable parts of the human character.
Now, as an example of the sincerest things:
I actually love the title more the more that I think about it: at present I’m thinking of it as an ellipsis of “so there is something I need to say to you,” and the ten thousand variations on those words that begin every painful conversation one has in English. The words, isolated and stark are almost as strong as “Dear John” to me. (Sidenote: those of you who don’t speak English as your first language possibly don’t know that the phrase “Dear John” is, in America at least, the classic beginning of a breakup letter and, more classically, the beginning words of a letter from a woman looking for divorce. There’s a good article on the etymology here: Dear John Origins. Thank you for your attention to this subtlety that does, in fact, affect my reading of letters written to me, John Myles White. We now return you to your regularly scheduled set of observations.)
What interests me so much about So There is that it seems so utterly sincere. Many people profess that they have their hearts on their sleeves, but few, few people actually give out their hearts’ contents without reservation — and fewer still to the entire world. Yet every letter I have ever read on So There has been utterly sincere — an paradigm of that sincerity from grief that brings out arrogance, paranoia, self-consciousness and so on. Nearly every one of these letters touches me with its sadness, even if I consciously believe that the couple described was doomed from the beginning and even if the letter itself removes my ability to imagine loving the writer. Though one does not love, but one has sympathy and shared feeling of humanity.
And there is also something tragic about So There that fascinates me: the tragedy that these words of such utter truth will probably never be heard by their interlocutors. (I can’t think of a better word at present, though I would love one with less Latinate formality.) Having in my life had the occasion to read things written about me after I had left a lover, I can say that few things affect a sensitive person so deeply. When the words were never meant to be heard by you, their meaning is so much stronger.
And, if that were not enough, the wonderful quotations present at the bottom of each page win me over time and again.
If I were an alien trying to provide the best summary of humanity, I would probably make a copy of Google’s cache and leave it at that.