A Nervous Splendor
I just got another genius book pushed on me called “A Nervous Splendor.” For about 4 months in 1888, on the same block in Vienna, unpublished Freud, the prodigal Crown Prince Rudolf, Theodor Herzl, Hugo Wolf, Anton Bruckner, and Johannes Brahmes all lived together without knowing their inevitable collective contribution to history. The book interweaves their journey’s and hints at what the future holds. It ends the day Hilter is born.
“By such a paradox Vienna attained greatness after all. It bred geniuses who foretold a modern wound. And Rudolf too became in a time a sad but significant precursor. He was the herald of an alienation common to the youth of our day. Over him loomed Franz Joesph, a storybook incarnation of The Establishment….
Nervousness is the modern sickness. It is the sickness of the century. Outside, everything is gleam and gorgeousness. One lives only on the outside, one is led astray by the dancing phosphorescence…one no longer expects anything from the inner life, from thinking or believing.”
Which echoed what Alinsky said less than 100 years later about an entirely different world–you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same:
The rest of the middle class, with few exceptions, reside in suburbia, living in illusions of partial escape. Being more literate, they are even more lost. Nothing seems to make sense. They thought that a split-level house in the suburbs, two cars, two color TVs, country club membership, a bank account children in good prep schools and then in college, and they had it made. They got it–only to discover they didn’t have it. Many have lost their children–they dropped out of sight into something called the generation gap. They have seen values they held sacred sneered at and found themselves ridiculed as squares or relics of a dead world.
But basically, Austria had peaked and inertia was the only thing keep it going. There was optimism, but mostly just fear. It blanketed the town. And in response, people stuck to what they knew best. They further embraced the Monarchy. They reveled in customs, tradition and archaic expression. But none of that shook off the fear. And the one man with some optimism, the Crown Prince and heir to the throne, so hamstrung by the system, put a bullet in his head. And was succeeded by Franz Ferdinand and the First World War.
And so the book asks this question over and over again: “Why doest thou suffer? Why doest thou live?” It doesn’t answer it of course, but it’s still a good question.
I’m 26 and after emerging from University and also from working full time on nights about a year and a half ago, I cannot even find the words to communicate how infuriating I find the acceptance and pursuit of mediocrity that consumes the Western world today.
From the quote:
They thought that a split-level house in the suburbs, two cars, two color TVs, country club membership, a bank account children in good prep schools and then in college, and they had it made. They got it–only to discover they didn’t have it.
Once thing I’ve noticed about the suburban dream is that most people never discover that they “don’t have it.” Rather they consciously, or sub-consciously (depending on their self-awareness, intelligence, and ability to accept reality) live in an ignorant bliss, satisfied to live out the remainder of their days striving for a greater degree of mediocrity.
For example, if I were to make a list of things I want to accomplish in my life, material goods would not be on that. Rather a more general goal such as achieving a level of income to live well would appear on the list. Yet, some people will justify working a shitty job and living an unfulfilling existence because they strive for some material goal that provides very little intrinsic satisfaction. So they’ll say, “In three more years of work, I’ll earn enough to buy a sweet Lexus.” They’ll get the Lexus, drive it around for a year or two basking in social status and false self-worth, and shortly thereafter they’ll think, “man, in four more years I can buy a Porsche.”
Even worse still are the late thirty-somethings that will say things like “I’m an Accounts Payable Analyst for a car dealership and I love my job.” The degree of self-delusion in that statement is unbelievable. Who sets out to become a meagerly Accounts Payable analyst? How can you “love” that job. Even at 26, a large portion of my friends have resigned themselves to the popularly prescribed notion of happiness. They are “content” at working jobs they hate, and balance that off by buying nice things.
I believe it is the refusal to conform to the conventional pathways that separates people from suburbia. That same stubbornness also has consequences and can make life a lot more difficult according to conventional definitions of quality of life, but it is the internal happiness, and true personal achievement that make all the frowns from my neighbors at my ill-manicured, yellowish-green lawn worthwhile.
https://ryanholiday.net/archives/the_dream_and_the_green_light.phtml