Picnic comma lightning : the experience of reality in the twenty-first century /
In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert Humbert offers a memorably brief account of his parents' death, 'picnic, lightning.' Picnic Comma Lightning, too, opens with death, that of Laurence Scott's mother, because, for a philosopher, death raises a profound existential question...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
W.W. Norton & Company,
[2019]
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| Edition: | First American edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert Humbert offers a memorably brief account of his parents' death, 'picnic, lightning.' Picnic Comma Lightning, too, opens with death, that of Laurence Scott's mother, because, for a philosopher, death raises a profound existential question. How do we know what is real, especially when we have come to question the reality of so many of our day-to-day experiences? Writing from the intersection of philosophy, politics and memoir, Scott transforms his personal meditation on loss into a beguiling exploration of what it means to exist in the world today. It used to be that our lives were rooted in reasonably solid things, to people, places and memories. Now, in an age of online personas, alternative truths, constant surveillance and an increasingly hysterical news cycle, our realities are becoming flimsier and more vulnerable than ever before. Scott's far-ranging examination charts the ways our traditional mental models of the world have started to fray. He ponders how ubiquitous cameras reframe our private lives (an event only exists once someone posts the video), how mysterious algorithms undermine our attempts at self-definition through their own data-driven portraits and what happens in those moments when our illusions about reality are ruptured by incontrovertible facts (like the death of a parent or a bolt of lightning). |
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| Item Description: | "First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 2018 under the title Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality." |
| Physical Description: | xxviii, 268 pages ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |
| ISBN: | 9780393609974 0393609979 |