1 Intro

Readers who attain the end of this book will doubtless find themselves thinking of other kinds of exorbitance, historical and contemporary, in areas where they have competence that I do not, that might have been considered in it. Saying that I mean them to may not entirely head them off.

The impetus behind this book is that though mystical experience may seem uncommon, the language of mystical experience is almost universal.

Physiognomies

2 Fit

3 Reach

4 Obsession:

5 Ascesis

During the early centuries of the Christian era, the trackless deserts of Egypt appear to have been thick with hermits and recluses, so that, in whatever direction one struck out, one would be likely to light upon a saint in the self-making sitting by his juniper bush.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1869, 2:114) in 1869: “For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence.”

Exorbitance engines

6 Copia

7 Desktop

The servants of a bureaucracy would be unfaithful servants to the degree that they might be devoted to bureaucracy’s effects rather than its efficiency, its ends rather than the perfecting of its means, which might therefore put them at risk of acting outside proper channels or short-circuiting approved procedure.

The heroism of the maverick cop or intelligence agent in what is tellingly known as the “police procedural” is always essentially a redemptive victory over the corruption of bureaucratic procedure.

Bureaucracy is therefore essentially a form of methodism—that principle of devotion to the supremacy of manner over matter that exerts its force in so many areas of human feeling and behavior.

8 Exponentiality

9 Glory

Nevertheless, the glorification of the glorious is never merely self-abasement on the part of the glorifier. At the very least, one’s giving of glory may be a kind of investment. Evicted or distant from glory oneself, one may keep alive through one’s cooperation in the system of glory the possibility of one day being at its apex. “Who is he to be a worm in the sight of the Lord?” ends the Jewish joke about two competitively pious men vying for the most charismatically abased condition.

10 Planetude

It is a strange kind of decolonization that involves the turn away from the preoccupation with merely British literature, culture, and history in order to try to encompass the totality of other literatures and cultures. The late nineteenth-century effort to acquire territory and resources so well known to schoolchildren as the “scramble for Africa” is repeating itself in the efforts to expand epistemic dominion over the histories, literatures, and cultures of the entire world, masquerading as a kind of restitution.

Writers on climate change are wont to assume and sometimes to articulate astonishing levels of responsibility in the two senses of being guilty of actions and of having infinite duties of reparation. … Imagine if it were really possible to make good the willed extermination of peoples by good actions performed in solemn memory of them. The solemnity of imaginary restitutions is a cover for their howling and disgusting absurdity.

One of the problems with serious things is that they are taken to be urgent. Some of them are. But really serious things require more than urgency. Emergency responses tend to be highly energetic, ruinously expensive, inordinately exhausting, and therefore inefficiently episodic. So actually, really serious matters require the opposite of urgency. They require actions that can be assimilated into the unnoticed routines of everyday life, … There is little I can do to protect against this being taken as a warning against intense feeling and a counsel of rational coolness, but let me try. Passion is not the opposite of reason; the opposite of reason is unreason. Whether a belief is arrived at or adhered to in serenity or vehemence has exactly nothing to do with its utility as a belief, which depends on the quality of the attention to its object it embodies. The more cultic appearances of climate change discourse are a defection from seriousness not because of their passion but because of their absorption in it.

Outside quote

I love Jesus Christ. “The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.” He was the most beautiful dude. … His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers. —John Jeremiah Sullivan