A recent essay at The Atlantic deplores how wealthy people gentrify urban neighborhoods, making them sanctuaries of silence. Silence is a manifestation of class and racial privilege. How much better if those wealthy whites would just let the other side of the binary express itself in all its noise and craziness.
One reader responds:
I live in a semi-rural area, so I don't know who's right, but based on my (many) excursions into urbania, I suspect the reader is.
The essayist's, incidentally, is an exercise in the left hemisphere: a narrative written to fit a logocentric idea. The story is written from a rationalized ideal. It's an exercise in Russell Kirk's "defecated rationality." (And no, I'm not being a moron for putting Kirk and Derrida on the same side of an argument . . . I've explored this and will continue to do so),
The reader's response is more right-hemispheric: reality ("real reality," embodied, earthy, etc.) giving rise to a reflection on what is.
"Narrative": a bogus story written from an ideal.
"Reflection": an honest attempt to come to grips with what actually is.
