Philosophy is to music as fiction is to visual art, roughly, maybe. I am naturally more inclined to the former, I think. Extreme abstraction versus things more fleshed out, closer to sensual reality, and possibly more false. Of course I could be completely wrong.

Extreme abstraction:

I’ve known it all along, from the very first bit of consciousness. That they sit so close to the communal fire that they have long immolated themselves in it. And that there is nobility in being more restless and agitated than average.

Really while I’m in the pile I only really care about dominance, about climbing above the person next to me—an undignified state of affairs. Yet nothing else motivates me in such claustrophobic circumstances, with such miniscule horizons…
The assumption might be that climbing to the top of the heap may provide a new vantage point for looking out, but that does not feel right at all. Real innovation—innovation being the only thing that matters—requires, at least for a certain sort, more than anything, ones own hands to the earth, with no middlemen whatsoever. Of course the danger is spending an entire lifetime re-inventing the wheel and the ridicule that goes along with such an occupation, but at least it’d be like nothing else under the sun, a fact that does give value to such failure.

The real struggle is between curiosity and integrity—horizontal drift versus digging deep, as digging deep requires fixed points, assumptions, immovable and load bearing, the aesthetic versus the ascetic.

This last bit: it’s because of the shear strength required to fix one’s own points. N. talks about viciousness of ancients (beheading, quartering yadda yadda)—that it was all for the sake of memory, a conditioning for what is adaptive and thus good, a necessary layer of blood laid down, as the very foundation of civilization. But there are things far higher than civilization. To be more than merely adaptive, and furthermore not be stuck in any way-stations, to forever theorize, wander, and dabble but to really live by one’s own laws, new laws—may require a new negation of the flesh, almost as vicious…
_________________

So:
[no red meat
No refined sugar
No orgasms
--req for a dream]

Something along those lines. Sorry fellers. At least later.
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also, hmmmm:
"Sartre states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. "The look" of the other found the person's own being. The consequence is conflict. In order to keep the persons own being the person must control the other but must control the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a profound manifestation of "Bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the others freedom. That is to say that the purpose of the participants is not to exist but to keep the other participant looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called love but is in fact nothing more than emotional alienation and a denial of freedom through conflict with the other. Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a persons' relationship to their "Facticity" (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by "the look" and ergo radically missing their own freedoms the participants can enter into masochistic and sadistic attitudes. This happens when even the participants cause pain to each other to try to prove their control over the other's look they cannot leave because they believe themselves so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable."

..real integrity is standing on two feet in the face on innumerable seductions here and there: sensual pleasure the most innocuous, the worst being the home and hearth that's both in back and in front (because it can feel so healthy!)

"In 1951...MIT was not exactly an intellectual backwater, but it was nothing like what it is today...it also had a less exclusionary tradition than Harvard or even Princeton. By the 1950's, perhaps 40 percent of the mathematics faculty and students at MIT were Jewish. Bright youngsters from New York City public schools, effectively barred even then from attending Princeton as undergraduates, went there. Princeton was 'out of the question for a Jew,' recalls Joseph Kohn, who enrolled as a freshman at MIT in 1950. 'At Brooklyn Tech the greatest thing in the world was sending a student to MIT.'"

HAHA. That was only 50 years ago. So, the point isn't to shed identity and align yourself with the Hegemon. It's to topple that beast over, put yourself on top--and popular values re-align soon after. Like in the Believer: "Maybe we're all Jews now". And put the Asians there too, of course. At Dart I forgot what it felt like to be in a crystalline meritocracy, how correct it felt. I had long stopped believing in god but in the not too distant past I believed unequivocally (transcendently!) that a 95 was always vastly better than a 90. That was before I had the precolonial bullshit architecture of the sons of old Dartmouth shoved in my face all day, before I could ever think that achievement could be a myth, that what was really on top of the mountain I was climbing wasn't the smartest or the best, but a bunch of cretin mediocrities in pink polo shirts, and only because their daddies' daddies had bigger guns and no conscience. What I mean is I really do look forward to a time where J&As rule the world...