## Metadata - Author: [[Nathan Hill]] - Full Title: The Nix - Category: #books ## Highlights - surface smooth and spotted with brown specks. On top of the salt block was ([Location 2322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=2322)) - Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible. ([Location 4699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=4699)) - I’m in this facsimile of Main Street USA. This charming little street that multinationals like Disney helped annihilate in the real world. Nobody here seems to mind the irony, though.” ([Location 4731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=4731)) - The thing that made Alice so frightening was that she did not seem to care if she was liked. She did not seem to spend any mental energy accommodating other people, accounting for their wishes, expectations, desires, their basic need for decorum and manners and etiquette. And Faye’s opinion was that everyone should want to be liked—not out of vanity but because wanting to be liked provided an essential social lubricant. In a world without a vengeful god, the desire to be liked and to fit in was the only check on human behavior, it seemed to Faye, who wasn’t sure if she believed in a vengeful god but knew for a fact that Alice and her cronies were atheists to the bone. They could be as rude as they cared to be and not worry about retribution in the afterlife. It was disarming. Like being in the same room with a large and unpredictable dog—that constant latent fear of it. ([Location 6912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=6912)) - “Porn is a problem for the whole project of enlightenment,” Alice said. “If otherwise rational, educated, literate, moral, and ethical men still need to look at this, then how far have we really come? The conservative wants to get rid of pornography by banning it. But the liberal wants to get rid of it too, by making people so enlightened they no longer want it. Repression versus education. The cop and the teacher. Both have the same goal—prudishness—but use different tools.” ([Location 6940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=6940)) - “This is how to do it,” he said. “Let us practice. Do you feel it? Obviously it is a subjective experience, which is the only kind that matters. Anything objective is not really feelable.” ([Location 7247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=7247)) - Of course, it’s not like the graffitists wrote anything important. Just their own names, over and over, bigger and louder and more colorful. Which come to think of it was the same strategy used by fast-food chains on billboards across the country. It was just self-promotion. It was simply more noise. They weren’t writing because something desperately needed to be said. They were advertising their brand. All that sneaking around and risk-taking to produce something that only vomited back up the dominant aesthetic. It was depressing. Even subversion had been subverted. ([Location 7974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=7974)) - “Sometimes the country thinks it deserves a spanking, sometimes it wants a hug,” Periwinkle said. “When it wants a hug, it votes Democrat. I’m hedging on it’s a spanking moment right now.” “It’s time to go now, sir,” the man with the clipboard said. “One second.” “Conservatives tend to believe more than the rest of us that we need a spanking. Read into that whatever you want.” Periwinkle laughed. The anchors laughed. He was a natural on television. “Right now the country sees itself as a poorly behaved child,” he continued. “When people vote, what they’re really doing, way deep down, is externalizing some childhood trauma. We have reams of paper showing this.” ([Location 8453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=8453)) - Imagine a single drop of water: that’s the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that’s the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that’s Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it’s his job to prevent this closure. But how to say it right? ([Location 8944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=8944)) - “I provide heat. Drama. The police want reasons to crack down on the radical left. I supply those reasons. I print that we’re going to kidnap delegates or spike the drinking water or bomb the amphitheater and it makes us look like terrorists. Which is exactly what the police want.” “So they can do what they did tonight. Gas us and beat us up.” “In front of the TV cameras, with people cheering them on at home. Yes.” Faye shakes her head. “But why help them? Why encourage all this…”—she waves her hand around at the bloodied youths now occupying the sancuary—“all this madness, this violence?” “Because the more the police crack down,” Sebastian says, “the stronger our side looks.” “Our side.” “The protest movement,” he says. “The more the cops beat us up, the more our argument seems correct.” He leans back into the pew and stares blankly forward. “It’s actually pretty brilliant. The protestors and the police, the progressives and the authoritarians—they require each other, they create each other, because they need an opponent to demonize. The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.” ([Location 9326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=9326)) - “Melancholy,” Periwinkle says, “had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. ([Location 9904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=9904)) - “What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.” ([Location 10018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=10018)) - Pwnage once told Samuel that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps. And for both Samuel and Faye, circa summer 2011, people were definitely enemies. Mostly what they wanted out of life was to be left alone. But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone. ([Location 10282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01A4B1PEE&location=10282))