it's freaky how, of late, literature lessons have been confronting issues that i've just been thinking about. for instance, last night chit and i were talking about how thinkers are the problems of society, because we refuse to accept ideals and rules and we just pave the way for anarchy. i don't know if i'm being pretentious by calling myself a thinker, but i do think too much sometimes and it's not only scary the way morality can be pushed further and further, but its also depressing. and the way i keep thinking about things, any action can be rationalised. that if it makes someone happy, why not? i am liberal, i reckon, and there are many things that i find perfectly acceptable which many others don't. but i think the point is that morality isn't a rational thing.

elaboration shall be done elsewhere.

anyway, i was also saying something about how thinking makes life so much more unhappy. i think i said it on isolde or something.. because we think so much that life just becomes so pointless, and it's just a means to some end, and we don't even know what the end is. something like that. and then george eliot goes and says the same thing again, only she adds another insight.

"The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents."

i never realised that it would be worse to have miseries to deal with, and yet no concept of discussing these problems with someone, or dissecting the issue to make it smaller and better, or something. but somehow i disagree with her. because the things i think about aren't 'impersonal enjoyment and consolation'. i don't have a lot of griefs and discontents, but i do have some, and isn't it worse to have that, as well as the 'bigger questions' that disturb higher sensibilities? the questions of life, the universe and everything, that don't occur to ruder minds?

but on the other hand, i suppose the point she's making is that more cultured people have some outlets, some form of catharsis. ok but i still don't understand what this comparison has to do with godfrey cass. besides, perhaps, to show that maybe he would have been better off had he been of a higher sensibility? i think i should talk to purvis.

and yet again with the thinking. so far, questions: thousands. answers: nil. confusion: infinite.