Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Simone Weil 22



You could sell your soul for friendship. So many souls are priced not to sell. The market on souls is small, in any case, but to charge a Jackson (soon a Tubman) proves prohibitive. Check the inventory: souls up to the rafters, gathering dust and cockroaches. So many of us valorize its obscurity. The allure of depth is strong, but a shallow soul would have a bigger audience. We've pulled soul into academia, we don't want it in our free time. Time—not soul—is free. We giggle in the corner about soul, because it's so damn earnest. Soul's an evasion of the important work of economics. Soul mansplains. (This conversation is way too full of dudes.) Soul says “you're fired!” then retreats to an inner sanctum outside the range of your GPS. They'll say they tried everything and still they can't sell souls. A self-fulfilling prophecy! He did buy souls once in the 1970s, when he was first starting out. The mimeo machine sounded like a train. Our rail project has too many over-runs. Only soul still thinks it can.


[based on a fb conversation on Don Share's wall about small-press publishing]

2 comments:

Janet said...

This would be fun if it weren't rather horrifying. Of course I mean rather horrifying in a good & necessary way.

Karen said...

I'm with J. I'd say cut the word "soul" a bunch of times - I think less will be more. "So many of us valorize its obscurity" - so true. I'm thinking, too, of the value of friendship. Worth a soul? - probably, if I only knew what that really meant. "This conversation is way too full of dudes" - almost always the truth.