nicole’s brain garden
"Now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die–and let its children die, each one–for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film […] forget for a moment the Entertainment, and think instead about a U.S.A. where such a thing could be possible enough for your Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time?
[…] You cannot kill what is already dead. […] This appetite to choose death by pleasure if its available to choose–this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. […] in this one part correct: ‘Someone is to blame.’
[…] But not someone outside you, this enemy. Someone or some people among your own history […] Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But let someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say choose to you you make expressions with your face such as ‘Herrrrrre we are going.’ Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.
[…] Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress […] But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?
[…] This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth, it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, posibly, for listening to."
-- David Foster Wallace