The whole and integrated person

Being an integrated, whole person in the midst of a high-powered career in the city these days, means nothing so much as to be in touch with, and to contain within oneself, the whole network and set of frequencies of civilisation - in short, it is to be, in human flesh, the most complete monster imaginable.
~

The fallacy in such a statement is immediately apparent: a value judgment is being made in addition to an assumed totalising dynamic rarely found in any human being, and even then only partly realised. The commercial commander with the sensitivity of a poet, the chess player of politics who has a specialist's attention to detail. But its truth remains even if its comprehensiveness is questioned: what should one take way if not everything? And then we would be in the state of nature once more, at the terrible whim of nature - which we are no longer able to withstand.

Perhaps this is the terrifying truth of nihilism: that we have become this artifical construct, a regressive metaphor, and are no longer able to return to ourselves. What we simulated we've become, and now we are characters in our own dreams - except that the dreamers are dead.

To remember that state is to relive the trauma of death, and we are entirely haunted, entirely burdened, entirely oppressed. It is not just that we are nothing, for in a sense, then, we never were anything that our communicative lingua franca could decisively capture. It is rather that we are forced to alternatively disconnect from and convey what is entirely impossible to reconstruct except as chimera to inject with our lifeblood and energy - we are neither inside nor out, operating like conduits and communicating like mirrors, always between states, destined to experience their distribution or reanimate in their absence.