This passage, which arrived at the beginning of the last surge of reading, resonated:
Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination - not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge....
I tell people that to the extent that I am a paranoid, I have arrived there through literature rather than the usual vectors, religion and politics. I have learned paranoia (of the form described above) from Julio Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, Warren Ellis, Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss. And sometimes research is sometimes a little bit too much like insanity for me to be totally at ease in its presence.
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Other paranoid reading: Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy...Nabokov's Pale Fire, and that short story, Signs and Symbols I think it's called...much of David Foster Wallace...all of Poe...Rushdie, maybe? Hmm. There's more: perhaps a class, even?
I would eagerly take that class.
I think I unconsciously carry around Frederic Jameson's observation that conspiracy theory is a degraded form of cognitive mapping, and constantly second-guess my attempts to understand the world as a result...
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