Tessa reviewed Land Sickness by Nikolaj Schultz
Review of 'Land Sickness' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A special mix of genres, both an easy read and a challenging essay in terms of its resources. And a very necessary postface on the Europeanness of it all..
And the first clear explanation on why existentialism just doesn't do it these days (!):
''If I cannot sleep, it is because I have been transformed into a weird monstrosity of a species that I do not particularly like, that my mind hectically tries to grasp, but I lack the words and expressions to understand. The insight from the existentialist tradition I was fond of as a teenager no longer hit the spot. [...] Existence probably still precedes essence, but this new existence is definitely another sort of being, one that is constantly fleeing home. It is not just that I exist for myself, [..] it seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining …
A special mix of genres, both an easy read and a challenging essay in terms of its resources. And a very necessary postface on the Europeanness of it all..
And the first clear explanation on why existentialism just doesn't do it these days (!):
''If I cannot sleep, it is because I have been transformed into a weird monstrosity of a species that I do not particularly like, that my mind hectically tries to grasp, but I lack the words and expressions to understand. The insight from the existentialist tradition I was fond of as a teenager no longer hit the spot. [...] Existence probably still precedes essence, but this new existence is definitely another sort of being, one that is constantly fleeing home. It is not just that I exist for myself, [..] it seems that I exist from others, like a spider in a web, sustaining myself by catching and feeding off them. [....] The nausea that keeps me from falling asleep is due not to the eternal inescapable depths of my freedom or endless corridors of my own subjectivity, but to its recurrent, external traces in the world. Here lies my bad faith, not in social conformity or subjective inauthenticity, but in the immeasurable, destructive social and natural vestiges that my actions entail. This is what seems impossible to escape - not freedom as such, but the material cost of it.''