Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self-Help book
“The cobbler’s bench has become in fact a table. Tables are now being manufactured which look like cobblers’ benches but are not.Thought Experiment: Try to imagine the circumstances under which the fifty non-tables converted to use as coffee tables would become less and less desirable until one would actually prefer an ordinary table constructed of four legs and a top. E.g., imagine you are an archeologist of the twenty-first century, exploring the abandoned beach cottages of Martha’s Vineyard and finding all manner of strange artifacts used as tables—pieces of driftwood, capstans, shark jaws— and that you need a good worktable and, not recognizing these objects as tables, you construct a simple and sturdy table from a plank of wood and four lengths of two-by-fours.Thought Experiment (II): Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and ano...ther place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self—just as a pine piling saturated in creosote resists corrosion by the sea—and thus possesses a higher coefficient of informing power for the nought of self.If you say that a writing table made by Thomas Sheraton is of value because it is excellently made and beautiful, how would you go about making a writing table now that would be similarly prized as an antique two hundred years from now?The real question of course is whether the twentieth-century self is different from the eighteenth-century self, both in its reliance on “antiques”MoreLess
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