Showing posts with label Monkees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monkees. Show all posts

"THEN I SAW HER FACE": PREMATURE ENLIGHTENMENT IN ART AND LIFE

Would THIS face lie?
                                                     

In the movie Fight Club, charismatic terrorist Tyler Durden chastises the more timid, never-named narrator for advocating what Durden disdainfully calls “premature enlightenment.”

Durden uses this colorful, vaguely obscene-sounding expression to refer to the tendency of an individual, following a protracted period of mental anguish and spiritual suffering, suddenly to succumb to “wishful thinking”: that is, all at once to see only what he wants to see, pushed into this state of willed myopia by a desperate desire to manufacture inner peace for himself.