Art Attack Central

Fixing stuff, myself included…


“Ordinary Life”

I’m thinking about something Doris Lessing wrote in The Memoirs of a Survivor:

“We can get used to anything at all; this is [a] commonplace, of course, but perhaps you have to live through such a time to see how horribly true it is. There is nothing that people won’t try to accommodate into ‘ordinary life…'”

Insert your circumstance, time and place here.

“…This is the sort of thing we accepted as normal. Yet for all of us there were moments when the game we were all agreeing to play simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling, that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy… or we believed it to be so. Perhaps our tacit agreement that nothing much-or at least nothing irrecoverable-was happening was because for us the enemy was Reality, was to allow ourselves to know what was happening. Perhaps our pretences, everyone’s pretences, which in the moments when we felt naked, defenceless, seemed like playacting and absurd, should be regarded as admirable? Or perhaps they were necessary, like the games of children who can make playacting a way of keeping reality a long way from their weaknesses?…”

What circumstance, or circumstances did you insert?

One might say “my personal insertion” is trivial considering the world events we constantly (admirably?) playact around/through; however…

Link

“Designated driver, on the information highway.”