“Tony…. are you the devil?”

“I am not evil, I am not the devil!”

I discovered some ruminations on the web log entitled Larval Subjects, it’s by a lecturer who lives a life of avid introspection:

This afternoon, as I gave my second lecture, I found my thought process a bit sluggish. Here and there I would stumble over a word, mispronounce something, or formulate an awkward sentence. Associations weren’t coming to the tip of my tongue as quickly as they often do. I had not yet eaten lunch and had had a very small breakfast, so the sluggishness of my thought process was literally a function of having no gas to run my engines.

Yet consciously, phenomenologically, this sluggishness, this lack of alertness, all seemed to me to be a failure of my own will. That is, they felt as if they were my own doing. I am not sure what is worse… Blaming such moments on oneself, or being haunted by the momentary phantasm that none of these things are one’s own doing, that ultimately we’re a sort of machine governed by very complex cause and effect relations over which we have no ultimate control. Continued…