If you are anything like me, and I have no reason to believe or even suspect you are, you were no doubt amazed when you discovered that déja vu is a facet of a larger family. That it is just one of three sensations involving our past that we can feel.
Along with deja vu there is, deja senti (already felt) and deja viste (already visited). They are all sensations which I experience regularly, they are so common to me that the sensations have lost their strangeness and now, now they are just normal. That is how life is supposed to be. When I first wrote this last night or early this morning (I am not sure as I no longer have a clock in my bedroom) I was convinced that I did not suffer from these experiences. Instead I suffered from something similar, something related to the feeling that I had already read things. This belief had been brought about while I was reading the chapter Lead in Primo Levi's Periodic Table. This made me think of the sensation I experienced when I began the second chapter of Amerika. I was excited because I thought I had stumbled across something new and I wished to crow about it, but now, now that I have gone back and refreshed my memory I can see that I was mistaken.
What I am still convinced about though is that this deja lu only occurs when I am reading Jewish authors. That I am certain of, but of course it is most likely I am wrong.
We live in a society that expects instantaneous results. Maybe and I suspect this to be true, we have always lived with this expectation. There was no golden age filled with individuals of infinite patience who believed in hard work and slow acquisition. There is just the past which has been flattened by time allowing the bad to be forgotten and the good to be exalted and with no evidence to the contrary – but this is a story for a different time.
It is this expectation for instantaneous results that makes some people blind to the tremendous steps those of us in educated Western societies have taken to driving prejudice underground, and subsequently the illusion that it has been eliminated. Rather than marveling at how far we have come (something that is almost hardwired into us, a dislike of those who are different, outsiders) they continue to bitch and moan about the small pocket of hold outs, the vocal minority who are not and never going to drink the kool aid. Prejudice will always exist, but it is no longer, for the most part, tolerated publicly. Well, some prejudices are tolerated publicly see: mouth-breather. This paragraph has been inspired more by the first chapter of Primo Levi's Periodic Table than Barak Obama's inauguration.
That is all.
