I've been wanting to--no, needing to write about this for weeks now. It's in regards to a work of fiction in another work of fiction (The History of Love by the fictional character Leo Gursky which Krauss focuses on as the plot's nucleus in her heartbreaking novel The History of Love). Anyhow, it's about how there was an exact origin for each individual emotion. For example, "surprise". There had to have been a status quo established before there could be anything that diverged from it. Krauss gives us many more emotions, and explains logically how the emotion must have developed. She then goes on to explain that after there was a basic set of emotions, people became addicted to feeling. People craved new feelings, whether negative or positive and became unhappy when anything stayed the same for too long.
I feel like this idea totally knocked me over the head and made so much sense in my own life. It made me think of all the times in my life that I have (and still do) seek out new feelings just for the sake of I don't know, feeling like I'm alive in some way. I had been thinking that this was negative initially, because I think it's what makes people buy things they don't need and date people they don't care about. But revisiting this idea, I feel like this constant search, this addiction, can be very positive. It also caused me to think that the constant search for charged emotions may be exclusively Western, but I think it applies to everyone in a very human sense.
The potential to feel new emotions, at least in my case, is what makes me want to discover new music, great books, film, art, and people. It causes me buy weird jewelry and eat exotic foods. Overall, I've realized that the result of this search and the resulting effect it has on me makes me who I am, in a very intrinsic as well as superficial sense.
