Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) led a life marked by flight, exile, incomprehension from the public, solitary anonymity, late recognition, and an early end, but he seems to have maintained a fairly irreverent sense of man’s problems, despite -or because of- the catastrophes that befell his people.
And he’s right: like an enabling limit, deprivation restores value to what we’ve ignored, but one wonders if this tactic works when the deprivation is deliberate: the purely physical fast, the little cycles of bingeing and purging, the cultivation of desire by the idle. Like all such deliberate tactics, it requires the Kierkegaardian techniques of rotation and repetition to avoid overuse and inefficacy, and like all tactics in general it never allows one to transcend the struggle.
