The Study of Human Life by Joshua Bennett

Author:Joshua Bennett [Bennett, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

COLERIDGE

4

There was something utopian in the way that I fell, almost axe-like, into the soft earth of those early years as a med school student on the brink of something brilliant, I was convinced, living mostly on the futon in my fifth-floor walk-up in Washington Heights, eating eggs for breakfast and some combination of whiskey and pizza for everything else, an absolute mess apart from the books, hundreds of them collected over the years, my idea of art whenever a visitor would ask when I was decorating and I would say it had simply never occurred to me that one would need much more than that, not the books but the feeling they produced, which I was chasing anyway, that sense of myself as a kind of erudite disaster site, a sad man full of reasonable things to be sad about: racism and ecological catastrophe, economic collapse, interpersonal trauma of various kinds toggling between the spectacular and the mundane, epigenetic stuff, PTSD and alcoholism, fighting grown men in public while thinking of it—reductively, of course—as a cultural inheritance on the one hand and on the other an act of nobility, some tie to a truer time when such things were not repressed in the name of a State monopoly on violence. Which is not what I told my friends at the time, of course. But I think about it a great deal these days. I think about including all of this in the essays I hoped to write in the time before the Manifesto. An intellectual history of emotion but through a distinctly racialized lens, as I understood this then to be both my expertise and my place in the dominant order. To discern what the drums are saying, I mean. Then relay it back with a bit of flair. In the King’s English. But with the urgency of the Slave.

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