The people here are genuinely subhuman. Including their "bosses." And as they are drawn into the social matrix here, they become even more so.
Perhaps Boston has it right in preserving the old asperity, or Chicago in preserving the ways of the old world. But what this place is is not good in itself. It merely raises the immensities and keeps the highways moving.
Heidegger on the "event." My first exposure to it. In the context of the thought of the time, I think what he's doing is responding to the triumphalist industrialist pragmatism of the Anglo-Americans with basically the same sensibility, except in an interior key. And he uses the ontological distinction (being/beings) as the fulcrum -- it long pre-exists this in his thought. Or perhaps there is more in these thoughts than I've yet realized.
Continuing my daily post-breakfast slogs through the novels of Henry James in chronological order. I'm firmly into the second mood, now -- The Tragic Muse.
One of my teachers in conservatory was a playwright in residence at the Guthrie when Tyrone et al. were starting it up. He used to tell stories about how Sir Tyrone would wander the halls during the long first winter, department to department, in each room and hallway raising his arms and calling out "Rise above!"
Mission territory.