Stuck (Zane Mandell)

What does it mean to be stuck? It means that you are looking at everything all wrong. The fact is you aren’t stuck; it is just that you have found something that makes you want to stop. It is that thing which you need to overcome whether it is external or internal. The narrator himself is stuck, but we shall get to that letter.

I feel it was a good thing that this reading that we chose was rather lengthy because it fit in well with understanding the topic that the narrator chooses to discuss. You must reevaluate where you are, in that reevaluation learn why you are doing what you are doing. The answer to why you are doing something is always the same, and that is ‘care’. That is the key by which you act, and its relationship with Quality is what makes ‘care’ what it is. I find this to be very interesting as the philosophic tidbit makes perfect sense, unlike plenty of the gibberish that has been previously discussed. Why do we act? Because we want to? Because we choose to? Because we are told to? All of these are encompassed by ‘care’ and the need or want for a betterment of Quality. It may not be that we care about what we do, but care about what may come as a result of it, or what may not come as a result of it. It is in fact the very reason that I am writing right now, if I did not care I would not choose to write this with Quality.

Like the narrator tends to do very often I am rambling. But I think this is important to look at deeper into himself. This brings me to a thought he has on the surface and innards of a machine. It is the surface that we must be very careful when working on, and once we get to the innards it is much easier to bang away to make the ‘machine’ work. When I read this I could not help but think about psychological studies where a doctor asks simple questions that don’t mean much on the surface but get at what is going on deeper down within the person. That is what we need to look at, as the “nightmares” about Phaedrus have continued we now know what is deeply troubling our narrator. Why he has chosen to write all this down is what I would like to get at. This, I believe, will act as a door within in to see the roots, just like those within Quality that he has been searching for the entire novel. The final portion of our reading should therefore be very revealing.