To me Ligotti reads like someone stuck in the “pit” of nihilism or a dark night of the soul. From the view of many spiritual traditions and from some theories of developmental psychology, this is a necessary phase where a person sees a side of reality we might here usefully call emptiness (but “vastness”, as mentioned in the article, works too), but importantly gets stuck on that emphasis and fails to remember or discover the value of form or what we might here simply think of as the mundane everyday experience of things. If this is right, then it suggests he’s been stuck there a long time; at least long enough to bother to write this book!
I say this because this all feels familiar, and yet I keep getting on with life anyway. I guess Ligotti would argue I resumed my role in the conspiracy as a trade off to temporarily suffer a little less or something like that, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that. Just what that is, though, I won’t say.
Oh, absolutely. Ligotti suffers from regular bouts of anhedonia, where his brain just can’t be bothered to experience pleasure, and his anhedonic states can last for years. It’s no mystery why Ligotti thinks everything is terrible, because he’s incapable of feeling happy for more than a couple months here and there...
This was really in-depth and I enjoyed it (heh).
To me Ligotti reads like someone stuck in the “pit” of nihilism or a dark night of the soul. From the view of many spiritual traditions and from some theories of developmental psychology, this is a necessary phase where a person sees a side of reality we might here usefully call emptiness (but “vastness”, as mentioned in the article, works too), but importantly gets stuck on that emphasis and fails to remember or discover the value of form or what we might here simply think of as the mundane everyday experience of things. If this is right, then it suggests he’s been stuck there a long time; at least long enough to bother to write this book!
I say this because this all feels familiar, and yet I keep getting on with life anyway. I guess Ligotti would argue I resumed my role in the conspiracy as a trade off to temporarily suffer a little less or something like that, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that. Just what that is, though, I won’t say.
Oh, absolutely. Ligotti suffers from regular bouts of anhedonia, where his brain just can’t be bothered to experience pleasure, and his anhedonic states can last for years. It’s no mystery why Ligotti thinks everything is terrible, because he’s incapable of feeling happy for more than a couple months here and there...
I’m glad you liked this! Thank you for reading.