Merve Emre, in the New Yorker, on Freud’s ideas through many biographies.
An enthusiastic popularizer of his ideas, he imagined his audience as anyone who had not managed to turn “his wishful phantasies into reality”—not titans of industry or artists but ordinary people who longed for more than what they had. The act of attending to their substitutions—of fantasizing—provided a daily experience of creativity, surprise, humor, and interpretive activity. One needed to have only the “courage and determination,” Freud urged, to heed the minor poetry of the unconscious.
[…]
The greatest testament to the human sense of “oneness” is civilization itself, man’s “mastery over space and time” in the form of shared aesthetic and political projects—beauty, order, religion, nationhood.
Yet civilization had not “increased the amount of pleasure” that men could “expect from life.”
It’s going to hurt for a while. It’s going to have to.
[…]
It’s going to be hard to end soon.
It’s going to wipe out your entire wildlife.
It’s going to be remembered fondly, your heart unable to keep its hands to itself.
[…]
It’s going to make your metaphors make you, even if you don’t want to.
Green. Varieties. Shades of. A name. A new deal. A proposal.
chartreuse buds beading above moss dappled shamrocks fragrant healing of sage, laurel, mint, basil, thyme, rosemary, myrtle amid the tall wonders of juniper pine, olive, pear even the meeting of sea and river— the sky, an intermingling of viridian and chetwode horizons, and cerulean clarity— offers its green seafoam, its seaweed pats, the crocodile at the edge of a freshwater marsh its teeth open gritted in green against the backdrop of hunter rainforest dripping in green
« L’imaginaire de mon lieu est relié à la réalité imaginable des lieux du monde, et tout inversement. L’archipel est cette réalité source, non pas unique, d’où sont sécrétés ces imaginaires : le schème de l’appartenance et de la relation, en même temps. »