<bq href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLzWdT7vGc&t=182s" source="YouTube" caption="Unedited interview (2003)" author="David Foster Wallace">Irony [is] the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.</bq> <hr> Overheard in the excellent video essay, <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx6hZ01xYVM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Gx6hZ01xYVM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Like Stories of Old" caption="Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now"> At <b>21:30</b>, <bq>The point is to reflect on the way we generally regard the cosmos and the fundamental forces that are at play there. And to question that, which we so often deem to be the realistic or the rational view of our universe. Because when the void at the end of all things is no longer a given, when the nature of our cosmos is vastly more complicated than we assumed, the supposedly objective view that drives so much of our nihilism becomes a rather fatalistic submission to our own limited perceptions, our own misguided judgments, and perhaps even to our own arrogance, the hubris of believing that we were capable enough of definitively judging the fundamental nature of our reality.</bq> At <b>23:00</b>, <bq>Ulrich Beck once wrote that we live in languages, that it's the community spirit, the sense of togetherness, for which, through shared symbols and meanings, that ultimately allows individuals to navigate their lives.</bq>