Thoughts

“‘The room filled with laughter,’” Noah read aloud. He looked up from the book in his lap. “Isn’t that odd?” he asked, “It’s like laughing at your own joke.”

“It’s a laugh track,” proposed Hannah.

Noah and Hannah were part of that social set in which the quest to demonstrate familiarity with the latest intellectual fashions has become habitual, instinctive, second-nature. Hannah was therefore eager to demonstrate she too was intimately familiar with Müllhauser, the German author whose book, Intellectual Detritus, had just appeared in English.

“In his seminal essay on the political philosopher Leo Strauss,” Hannah clamored pretentiously, “Müllhauser claims that Strauss should be interpreted not only as advocating esoteric reading, but also as demanding esoteric writing.”

As the room filled with the smoke from Hannah’s bong, Noah continued reading aloud, “‘The purpose of my art is to disrupt the narrative of the reader’s life and force him to create a metanarrative. I introduce self-referentiality into my art in order to persuade my readers to introduce self-referentiality into the psyche—in other words, to introspect, to reflect upon themselves.’”