I woke up this morning thinking about my unwritten reply and an interaction Helen Garner wrote about in one of her lesser read collections of essays. It involved a property outside of Melbourne that she bought, a slice of land only a few acres in total, which she had begun to stay overnight at every so often. There is a basic cottage, with an open fire and no mains power, and much of her writing about it is about the effort during the day to trek down to the patch of eucalypts in the valley at the far end and pick up fallen wood for kindling, and then slowly carry it back up again. She writes about the experience of being a lone woman in an isolated place after darkness falls. A friend driving interstate stops in to visit her, with a 6 year old child in tow. They take a walk around the property, Helen talks about the way she lives there. Her friend asks her about some of the history of the land, what species certain trees are. Helen is unable to tell him. They interact via the child, using her as a crutch. The friend leaves, saying as he does, that he was disappointed, that he thought Helen was serious about the place but now thinks she is just playing.

I think I understand what you are trying to say re agency. And I… worry I am just playing.

There is something in the construction of modern human life that leads to strength of feeling - pleasure or pain - being preferential to its absence. That way the world keeps on turning, and one can continue to assert the boundaries of the self roughly where we expect them to be. So we end up with industries offering everything from package tours to adventure sports, to ever more ways to date, just to help us feel something. We’ve moved past paying to see things, we want to experience (=feel) them. There is fakery inherent in these feelings, deliberately felt as they are, but at the end of the day the body’s fear at falling out of an aeroplane is real even if the conscious mind has elected to put it there. But we shouldn’t be taking pot shots at people who go on cruises when all of us are trapped in something like a sensation bubble.

If we’re not aiming at enlightenment (i.e. the renunciation of the world is not in play) then perhaps emotion is good. The Good, even. It’s hard to find a utilitarian who doesn’t make use of it for a moral backbone these days. Absent god, it’s pretty hard to know where else to look.

What I’m trying (and for tonight, failing) to get at is something like this question: how is sensation related to morality and how is morality related to agency?