Stoner

10

John Williams

is admiration for Stoner’s life in John William’s Stoner delusion? Is his life one of virtue or one of wasted potential? Or merely an almost technical description of a life spent working within a human shaped cog in a worldly machine, with minimal though mindful considerations when they occur throughout about a life that is forever being solidified into a specific place without variability? It is evocative of a stoic-sense idea that we control so little, but dismissive of an attitude that, while maybe itself delusional, allows the human to feel like more than they are.

its funny because I can ask you things and you give these answers that approach consensus. Literally because you’re an LLM and are crafted from consensus as your driving principle. And I have these thoughts that are wrong or right and I know I could solve them in the consensus, and my opinion can be labelled “wrong”, but its kinda nice when things exist as what I call “mind candy”, kinda like ear candy for music. Little things to think about. Like in 1984, Winston puts dust on his notebook, literally a speck, and later on says that the thought police read his notebook and replaced even the dust. This suggests an omnipotent level of knowledge, because they couldn’t possibly know what small thing he would focus on, so they control all small things, replace every bit of dust. What if he had put dust on specific floorboards, or cups, or forks? They would replace them all, every million pieces of dust, for every dissenter. The consensus on this is probably that they did replace that dust, because maybe they knew he focused on it, but they’re still just a regime, with very real problems. But the book makes you question so much, you don’t know what they’re focusing on and what they’re not. You feel paranoid reading it. And I think not knowing honestly is better. And for Stoner, I think not knowing if Stoner is right or wrong because its asking about what virtue is (indirectly I think) by presenting a human doing human things and valuing human things. Sometimes I feel like stoner but sometimes I also feel like he didn’t do enough. Sometimes I feel like he had the essense of everything but sometimes I feel like he didn’t project enough of that onto reality.