Tagged: amusement

City Lights in the Age of the Kafkaesque

Downtown at night.— I do not want what they are drinking. I do not want to hear what they are saying. I am repulsed by the thought of what they are thinking. My mind blacks out at the general noise, the mindlessly giddy laughter, the time-killing and cocksure banter, the publicly displayed “intimacies,” and the roiling sea of unmemorable faces in the artificial...

Aristotle On Catharsis, or On Detachment

A man lives in fear of saying the wrong thing, lest he be abandoned. Yet in truth the knowledge that they will abandon you if you say the wrong thing is all the more reason not to care what they want you to say.
The only legitimate purpose of amusement is as an efficient and necessary means of restoring the soul’s energy…