The UFO Files, The Hollywood Reset, & Don't Buy the Gold Card Hype
Kareem’s Daily Quote: All the things I want to say but can’t.
The Empty Box: What happens when “Disclosure” reveals absolutely nothing.
The Music Stopped, but the Bills Didn’t: A look at the Hollywood collapse.
Lutnick Makes Up His Own Numbers: The retail reality of the Gold Card.
What I’m Watching: Hacks
Jukebox Playlist: “Lover Man”
Kareem’s Daily Quote
“What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?” Denis Johnson
Writer Denis Johnson understood the geography of the human soul better than almost anyone. He had this way of looking at our most basic impulses and finding how they tend to bend towards tragedy. He once wrote, “What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?”
That quote is something I feel deeply, even though I know that, at first, it seems it can’t possibly be true. After all, isn’t communication a cure for loneliness? Don’t we believe, to our very core, that if we can just find the right words—if we can put them together in the perfect way, at the perfect moment—the person whom we are trying to reach (verbally speaking) will finally “get” it? Will finally “get” us?
And we will at long last have bridged the gap between our internal world and someone else’s.
But whenever you try to take a complex, messy feeling and use something as limiting as language to communicate it, you realize how much is lost in translation. And if you’re paying attention, that’s when it becomes painfully clear that you can never fully be known. Worse still, you can’t be fully known even to yourself. Because most utterances, no matter how rehearsed or heartfelt, aren’t what you meant to say at all. Which leads you to wonder, who is this “I” who’s communicating itself so shabbily?
I’ve felt this when being interviewed. I’ve felt it scribbling notes for a book or an article at three in the morning. I’ve felt it re-reading the words I just wrote. It’s this “thing” inside you, wanting to come out…but the second you try to hand it to someone else, it becomes diminished, less than. The “loneliness” Johnson was talking about is the space between what we mean and what is heard.
But here’s the silver lining: when we stop pretending that it’s easy, we start listening for the things that aren’t being said. We start looking for the “wires and pulleys” behind the performance, whether it’s ours or someone else’s. And we realize, too, that much of our communication is nonverbal, especially with people who are close to us, or who see us every day. Because we can talk 'til we’re blue in the face, but if our words contradict what someone knows of us based on our actions, all our fancy talk starts sounding like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon: just a bunch of “wah-wah-wah.”
So, whatever it takes, let’s keep trying. Because ultimately, in spite of how much I like this quote by Denis Johnson, I do know what’s lonelier than trying to communicate—and that’s giving up on communication altogether.
