'... Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism. ... By which, ... I mean, true heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of childhood. ... [T]here is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. ... Here is the truth -- actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.'
'True heroism is you, alone,in a designated work place. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care -- with no one to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk.' (查看原文)
I know three separate times during this unmotivated period I withdrew from college and tried working so-called real jobs. One was that I was a security guard for a parking garage on North Michigan, or taking tickets for events at the Liberty Arena, or briefly on the production line at a Cheese Nabs plant working the cheese product injector, or working for a company which made and installed gymnasium floors. Then, after a while, I couldn’t handle the boredom of the jobs, which were all unbelievably boring and meaningless, and I’d quit and enroll someplace else and essentially try to start college over again. My transcript looked like collage art. (查看原文)
The whole thing was just going through the motions; it didn’t mean anything—even the whole point of the classes themselves was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable. Except, of course, there was no argument about the fact that you had to turn in the papers, you had to go through the motions themselves, although nobody ever explained just why, what your ultimate motivation was supposed to be. (查看原文)
