July 26th, 2012 / 11:00 am
Music & Power Quote

GOOD OLD NEON

I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.—and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

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5 Comments

  1. Frank Rodriguez

      Big combo here. Curiously, on a recent freestyle Kool A.D. said he wanted to be a novelist “but let’s be honest who reads books anymore?”

      I’ma see KAD on Monday probs. I will throw The Pale King at him.

  2. postitbreakup

      i finally read this story last month, so amazing; feel like a triptych of “good old neon,” “The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing” & “the depressed person” makes anything i’d have to add on the subject redundant but he does it so skillfully i can’t feel mad about it

  3. Literature as Commentary on Grammer | HTMLGIANT

      […] which puts me in mind of something I read on the internet re GOOD OLD NEON […]

  4. Literature as Commentary on Grammer | HTMLGIANT | xliterature.info

      […] which puts me in mind of something I read on the internet re GOOD OLD NEON […]

  5. leo stillinger

      This is a quote from the DFW story “Good Old Neon”, correct?