"Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion"
About this Quote
“Greed” is a sly, self-implicating word to choose when the thing being hoarded isn’t money but meaning. Hillesum frames her hunger for knowledge as a vice, then undercuts the moral drama with the bodily comedy of “mental indigestion.” The move is precise: she refuses the flattering story of the pure-minded intellectual, insisting that even the life of the mind can be driven by appetite, compulsion, and overconsumption. It’s confession without self-pity, a diagnosis delivered with a wry wince.
The subtext is about control. To “absorb a massive amount of information” is also to try to outpace uncertainty: if you can take in enough, maybe you can make the world behave. The “consequent” indigestion signals the cost of that bargain. Knowledge doesn’t arrive as enlightenment; it can arrive as overload, as a clogged nervous system, as anxiety disguised as productivity. Hillesum is naming the modern condition before it had a name: the belief that more input will cure inner disorder, when it often intensifies it.
Context matters sharply here. Hillesum’s writing comes from a Europe collapsing into catastrophe, where the ordinary ethics of self-improvement look almost absurd against historical violence. Her sentence carries the tension of someone educated, alert, and cornered by events that no amount of reading can solve. Calling it “greed” is both an act of humility and a refusal to romanticize intellect as salvation. In that restraint lies the line’s quiet power.
The subtext is about control. To “absorb a massive amount of information” is also to try to outpace uncertainty: if you can take in enough, maybe you can make the world behave. The “consequent” indigestion signals the cost of that bargain. Knowledge doesn’t arrive as enlightenment; it can arrive as overload, as a clogged nervous system, as anxiety disguised as productivity. Hillesum is naming the modern condition before it had a name: the belief that more input will cure inner disorder, when it often intensifies it.
Context matters sharply here. Hillesum’s writing comes from a Europe collapsing into catastrophe, where the ordinary ethics of self-improvement look almost absurd against historical violence. Her sentence carries the tension of someone educated, alert, and cornered by events that no amount of reading can solve. Calling it “greed” is both an act of humility and a refusal to romanticize intellect as salvation. In that restraint lies the line’s quiet power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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