📘 None of the Above

I picked this book up in a bookstore in Dublin for half price. I’d seen the cover in so many different places: the bookshelf in my department, various bookstores, various book lists. And I really enjoyed reading it.

Travis opens the preface of the book with its premise (reminds me a bit of GEB). It reflects my biggest takeaway: that there is no point in trying to be understood, or desiring to be understood. “Being understood” might feel like being seen or heard. In reality it is a double edged sword where such an understanding of you is fragile and almost definitely untrue. Seeking this risks abdicating your own epistemic power over yourself, which should really only stay with you, anyways: you can never really promise who you are to anyone else. It’s a trap, this desire to be legible. And this is the case for your close family members, others who supposedly belong in your community, those who position themselves as allies: thinking that you should be understood reifies others’ relationship to you in a way that might lead you to feel ultimately alienated from yourself, codependent on others.

Sometimes the writing style takes after this principle and reads more like stream of consciousness than anything else. At times I also felt a bit like it was hammering the same point home across different chapters. But it’s impossible to fully treat a subject like this without going at the same point from multiple directions; to crack the illusion that we can know “what” another person is. These are just some things that I noticed and nothing more.

I guess one take on this blog is viewing it as an exercise on trying to be broadly “understood.” Part of my belief that this is not too vulnerable of a space is because I believe Travis and I think that despite the determinacy of thought there is no real way in which someone could extrapolate