Kept alive

By books. Or maybe you need to use them as worlds to escape to in order to really appreciate them?

Finished reading another (ninth...) Dame Iacub book. I wouldn't have thought books on some obscure aspects of French civil law could be read as novels, and enjoyed as rare sparks of pure intelligence at work.

Then, got back to Balzac, and read quite quickly the great Le Père Goriot.

And then, back to the real world, filled with people who can't even write a one-line facebook status without at least two spelling errors (and I mean people my age, writing in their mother-tongue).

The worst being, those people do get jobs.

In other news, when newspapers actually do carry some information, it's usually way outdated, imprecise, merely introductive, useless. Evolutionary psychology has become trendy at last...

Should we rejoice that the world does work somehow, or cry in despair that it doesn't work as well as it could? I mean, having all those peoples of dubious intelligences work at productive tasks is probably not the least astounding accomplishment of The Market.

To me what's really amazing is that for every job that there is in the world, there's someone willing to do it. Someone goes 'Yes, I will stand in the tunnel breathing exhaust fumes watching the cars go by making sure every thing's okay.' Someone goes 'Yes, I will work behind the elephant with the big shovel, I will do it.' Doctors go 'Yes I will confine myself to one particularly objectionable part of the human body all day every day. I will do it.'

Seinfeld

And on the other hand, of course, we have unemployment, the very existence of which is outrageous, and all the destructive and useless pseudo-jobs, in a net of corruption and ties to the state so intricate that to untie it would be even harder than sticking to vegan wine.

I mean, let's face it, what is worse, getting a productive job that'll get taxed, proceeds of which taxes will be used to commit crimes both against you and against other people, or get an unproductive job working for the state?

And to think Balzac was already so critical of his 19th century society, wonder what he'd write today. If he could get the writer job, that is.

2009-07-15