imperialisms of pleasure

i have to say that one of the disconcerting tendencies of human beings is to take a source of their pleasures or entertainments to harbor the entirety of life and significance. so you listen to literature professors and they theorize or even at this point take it as obvious that narrative or story-telling is our fundamental nature, and then after that they blow it up into everything, so that we and the world actually consist of stories. perhaps they've read too much harold bloom, or just too much, period. or say you're lady gaga or some other fashion freak: then you're arguing that clothes can make you into whomever you want to be, or that alexander mcqueen entirely changed the landscape of human identity. or even say you're a philosopher...then you think no one can live without wrestling with kant's moral theory. or you're a physicist and everything is made of numbers. or perhaps you spend all your time on your computer and the world turns out to be made of information. i'll just say: the fact that you love a good story had better be enough, because once you inflate it into a theory of everything, it's just ridiculous. that you enjoy x, or are moved by x, does not make x into the meaning, essence, and full extent of human experience or the universe. shakespeare didn't invent the human, dude: it's plenty that he invented good plays. it's quite seriously as though i said the the world is a country song, or a soap opera, or a baskteball game, or an azalea bush, or a deck of cards, or a cast-iron frying pan. i might make a nice riff out of such a statement, and it might express my passion for tammy wynette. but as a serious assertion it'd just be jive. there are many human pleasures, many human identities, many and varied objects in the world, and the excellence of any one of them doesn't make it into everything. try to make your own predilections a bit less . . . imperialistic.