Suvery Say: I'm a Big Giant Dork

"Once a man is truly himself in this way, he possesses an accumulated power that is sufficient for more than his own self-preservation, a power that he can let overflow, so to speak, onto others, through which he can take them into himself and identify himself with them. We are morally more worthy, more compassionate and authetic, the more each person is merely himself, that is, the more each person allows this inner core to become sovereign within himself, the core in which all men identical beyond the muddle of their social bonds and accidental guises."

"All relations with others are thus ultimately mere stations along the road by which the ego arrives at its self. This is true whether the ego feels itself to be basically identical to these others because it still needs this supporting conviction as it stands alone upon itself and its own powers, or whether it is stong enough to bear the lonliness of its own quality, the multitude being there only so that each individual can use the others as a measure of his incomparability and the indivduality of his world."

"One force is the yearning ofr th autonomous personality that bears the cosmos within itself, whose isolation has the great compensation of being identical to all others are its deepest, natural core. The other is the yearning for the incomparability of being unique and different, which is compensated for its isolation by the fact that each person can exchange with another some good that he alone possesses and whose exchange weaves both of them into the interaction of organic parts of a whole."

"I would prefere to believe that the idea of free personality as such and the idea of unique personality as such are not the last words of individualism -- that, rather, the unforeseeable work of mankind will even more numerous and varied forms with which the human personality will affirm itself and prove the worth of its existence." Lewis Simmel, "Freedom and the Individual"

And for all you Tyler People:

"To the extent that the metropolis creates these phychological conditions -- with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life -- it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, ad eep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existance. Thereby the essential intellectualistic character of the metal life of the metropolis becomes intelligable as over against that of the small town which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the conscious levels of the mind and develop more readily in steady equilibruim of unbroken customs. the locus of reason, on the other hand, is in the the lucid, conscious upper strata of the mind and it is the most adaptable of out inner forces."

"The smaller the circle which forms our environment and the more limited the relationships which have the possibility of transcending the boundaries, the more anxiously the narrow community watches over the deeds, the conduct of life and the attitudes of the individual and the more will the quantitative and qualitative individuality tend to pass beyond the boundaries of such communities."

" . . .That we follow the laws of our inner nature -- and this is what freedom is -- become percceptible and convincing to us and to others only when the expressions of this nature distinguish themselves from others; it is our irreplaceablity by others which shows that our mode of existance is not imposed on us from the outside."

"The decisive fact here is that the life of a city, struggle with nature for the means of life is transformed into a conflict with human beings and the gain which is fought for is granted not by nature, but by man."

"The metropolis places emphasis on striving for the mose individual forms of personal existance -- regardless of whether it is always correct of always successful." "The Metropolis and Mental Life" Lewis Simmel

Maybe that's why we all go out. . . .