To write is itself a gross declaration of a deep pretension. To write is to declare to all, “My thoughts are important! So important, that I must export them from my mind into the minds of others. My thoughts, my wondrous thoughts, are to good to simply be my thoughts. They must be everyone’s thoughts. The words in my mind must bounce around in the heads of others, their thoughts, annihilated, replaced with mine.” The vanity of mind, that the mere excrement of thought must be immortalized in word. And truly, thought is excrement. It’s done without intent, unconsciously throughout existence, it appears as does an urge, and the self-aggrandizing so called “author,” rather than discarding of this excrement as everyone else does, feels that he must smear it all across some parchment and shove it in the face of all around him. His glorious declaration, “I think! And this is what I’ve thought!” And without the slightest shame, akin to a toddler declaring that he is now potty trained. Maybe he should’ve been taught how to flush.
And the vanity multiplies with every sentence, and every page. “My thoughts, so magnificent, cannot be contained by brevity! It must extend across two, three, perhaps five hundred pages! A single volume cannot contain the intricacies and complexity of my propositions! So complex are my thought that to simply transmute it into the mind of the other without hideous disfigurement and distortion (what a tragedy it would be to in any form mutilate my divine thought!) would require endless pages spanning endless volumes! And, of course, my glorious thought is worth the effort and time such that any other should enjoy slaving over my every letter for countless hours, in his base worship of my mind!” How much thought, how much excrement.
And the vanity of the writer knows no end. You can find it in their presentation of themselves. Their pretentious posing, the fixing of the face into the pensive pout, as if their thoughts, so heavy and tremendous, weigh upon their shoulders at all times. “My thoughts, so heavy, so debilitating, to simply carry their magnificence puts me into a state of thoughtful depression.” This act of feigned self flagellation, in which they simply mime the action of whipping themselves and cry as if it were true. If only they would truly be whipped, and we could hear true cries rather than the caustic whines of their self pity. In their mind they wish to present themselves in the image of the self portrait, where they stare thoughtfully into the distance, intending to declare, “I am thinking right now! Oh yes, oh I am thinking! And these thoughts, so important, are beyond you, and beyond my surroundings! My thoughts, so enamoring, completely captivate my mind and drag me away from our reality! No, in fact, they bring me above our reality, beyond enlightenment!” In this are the base tactics of a snake oil merchant, aggrandizing and gesturing such that others may be drawn to see what could make one so pensive, so lost in thought? Though the naive may hope otherwise, and fall into the deceit of the writer, the answer is invariably vanity.
Cast out the writer, no good comes from them.
Some examples of the performative feigned pensiveness, posing for portrait or camera:
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