Friday, June 22, 2007

Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

The human agent, shaped and manacled by context and tradition, by established arrangements and enacted dogma, fastened to a decaying body, surrounded in birth and death by enigmas he cannot dispel, desperately wanting he knows not what, confusing the unlimited for which he longs with an endless series of paltry tokens, demanding assurance from other people, yet hiding within himself and using things as shields against the others, somnambulant most of the time yet sometimes charged and always inexhaustible, recognizing his fate and struggling with it even as he appears to accept it, trying to reconcile his contradictory ambitions but acknowledging in the end or, deep down, all the time that no such reconciliation is possible or if possible not lasting: this is the one topic from which there is no escape.

- Roberto Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

1 comment:

MT said...

That and where's the waiter with our order?