As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.

I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.

*

Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.

Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.

*

We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.

*

I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.

Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.

*

There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.

*

How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.

*

Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?