He seemed to flee reality as much as he embraced it, and, in "Advertisements," he explained why he did so.
"Maybe there is an element of fleeing reality to it".
Sometimes a house divided cannot stand, but our bipolar TV environment -- the pursuit of belly laughs and the evocation of deep pain, the desire to flee reality and the need to explore every weird crevice of it, the impulse to avoid Important Topics and the need to take them on with ferocity -- served us pretty damn well in the last year.
That may well be an impossible goal -- but working to reduce desire to flee reality by doing things like reducing economic inequality and treating other mental illnesses like depression that often drive addiction at least do not have the dreadful side effect of increasing the agony of others.
As thousands of men, woman, and children have fled horrific realities of brutal violence and extreme poverty and hunger in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, we also have serious concerns about the Administration's recent campaign of home raids to round up and deport these families and adult asylum-seekers.
But in 1816 he was cruelly reminded that he could not flee present reality entirely.
But not pointing to Russia's role in Syria is to flee a reality when the Obama reset is bogged down on the things Washington can't get from Moscow, including any Russian willingness to discuss its superior arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.
And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
He wanted nothing more than to flee "the horrible reality of existence, to leap beyond the confines of thought".
"Paul's Case," inspired by the Willa Cather story, merely hints at the sexuality of its central figure, who flees from dull reality to his doom.
