a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Leonard Cohen
Sep 21, 1934 - Nov 07, 2016

I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.[/b]

Me? Soaked to the bone.

Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore.

Dying for example.

The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.

Let alone knowing who is.

It doesn’t matter what you do because it’s going to happen anyway.

Let’s call this, for lack of a better word, freedom.

Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.

Including this?

We’ve got to learn to love appearances.

Tell that to those who don’t.

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

Yes, I’ve suffered with depression. But it’d say it suffered with me. [/b]

Brutally as it were.

Friends, if it’s any comfort, just remember this: no matter who wins election 2016 you lose.

Yeah, but come on!

Good news, nihilists: nothing’s very funny right now.

Not only that but hilariously.

Election day. The one Tuesday of the year that’s worse than a Monday.

Of course, some being far, far, far, far, far worse than others.

No, New York didn’t elect Trump. Congratulations. But it did invent him.

Along with, among others, Hillary Clinton.

Well, final word: I didn’t see this coming. I thought it was already here.

Indeed, and it is already four years old. At least.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.[/b]

True, but only until we are all dead and gone.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old?

Oh yeah.

Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?

Or: Sometimes people who seem bad end up being not as bad as you might have hoped, you know? Just not as often.

I’m looking for my voice.
It’s in your mouth.

Right behind your teeth usually.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.

And that has implications for everything that is going to be.

We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing “Hey Jude.” It was true, I didn’t want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It’s just that I didn’t know how.

And Paul after all is dead. So he can’t tell you.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ken Kesey

But, gee, the other nurse says, what on earth would make a man want to do something like disrupt the ward for, Miss Ratched? What possible motive…?
You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.[/b]

Much like this is a playground for the Kids.

To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you. I once had a pet pine squirrel named Omar who lived in the cotton secret and springy dark of our old green davenport; Omar knew that davenport; he knew from the Inside what I only sat on from the Out, and trusted his knowledge to keep from being squashed by my ignorance. He survived until a red plaid blanket–spread to camouflage the worn-out Outside–confused him so he lost his faith in his familiarity with the In. Instead of trying to incorporate a plaid exterior into the scheme of his world he moved to the rainspout at the back of the house and was drowned in the first fall shower, probably still blaming that blanket: damn this world that just won’t hold still for us! Damn it anyway!

I think this speaks for itself.

The best of all possible cages. Ben stepped back to regard the job with a sad smile. What more can one ask?

Besides, he built it himself.

…he’s finished with that; it’s like an old clock that won’t tell time but won’t stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

You know what this is a metaphor for. Well, anyway, I do.

He couldn’t seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.

So, is this a good thing or not?

But a system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything – and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.

Real close if you’re lucky. Or, sure, if you’re unlucky.

[iambiguous]

[b]David Wong

There were two spacemen right behind us, holding some kind of weapons on us that I didn’t recognize. They were bulky and ended in some kind of slanted lens thing. I kinda wanted to get shot with one, just to see what it did.[/b]

You know, like wondering what it’s like to be tased.

Cops do this every day, rifling closets and digging through your dildo drawer.

And that’s not even counting if you’re black.

He points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere else.

Let’s figure out where Trump fits in all this.

He had braces, sported a black Limp Bizkit Tshirt. Limp Bizkit is a band that was popular at the time. If you’re fortunate, you’ve never heard of them.

Of course we all have our own band here, don’t we?

The gun without the training just means you’ve given your attacker a free gun.

Not if you pull the trigger and get lucky.

I reached for the knob. At the same moment it began to melt and transform, turning pink and finally taking the shape of a flaccid penis. It flopped softly against the door, like a man was cramming it through the knob hole from the other side.
I turned back to John and said, ‘That door cannot be opened.’

Unless, of course, you are into that sort of thing.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jean Rhys

Well, that was the end of me, the real end. Two pound ten every Tuesday and a room of the Gray’s Inn Road. Saved, rescued and with my place to hide in - what more did I want? I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang. Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone. No more pawings, no more pryings - leave me alone.[/b]

And that goes double for me. And triple if you’re a Kid.

I thought if I told no one it might not be true.

And that’s why I’m not telling you.

It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing’.

It was a beautiful place. I’ll settle for that.

Let’s say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple — no, that I think you haven’t got. And that’s the right you hold most dearly, isn’t it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit.

And nowadays not just the sociopaths.

These people all fling themselves at me. Because I am uneasy and sad they all fling themselves at me larger than life. But I can put my arm up to avoid the impact and they slide gently to the ground. Individualists, completely wrapped up in themselves, thank God. It’s the extrovert, prancing around, dying for a bit of fun - that’s the person you’ve got to be wary of.

Well, them and the objectivists.

But you don’t know the world, I teased her.
No, only here, and Jamaica of course, Coulibri, Spanish Town. I don’t know the other islands at all. Is the world more beautiful, then?
And how to answer that? It’s different, I said.

In other words, it’s just best to leave it at that.

[iambiguous]

[b]Michel de Montaigne

No one is exempt from speaking nonsense – the only misfortune is to do it solemnly.[/b]

Let’s file that one [here] under, “If the shoe fits…”

Why do people respect the package rather than the man?

Let alone elect him president.

If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.

Much less anything else.

I listen with attention to the judgment of all men; but so far as I can remember, I have followed none but my own.

But only all the way to the grave.

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.

Let’s figure out why.

It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance.

Of course that is what makes them, among other things, turds.

[iambiguous]

[b]Stephen Fry

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.[/b]

So, apples and oranges?

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

And how depressing is that?

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Here we go again: context and point of view.

You are who you are when nobody’s watching.

He thought: That can’t be good.

An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.

That or wikipedia.

It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more…than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what.

Like being offended by the election of Donald Trump.

[iambiguous]

[b]Emily Brontë

I have no pity! I have no pity! The more worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething, and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.[/b]

Not sure where she is going with this but I know that I have been there.

It’s no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing, she muttered.

And that doesn’t change when reality is virtual.

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes…

Terror will do that. Well, among other things.

I’d be glad of a retaliation that wouldn’t recoil on myself; but treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends: they wound those who resort to them, worse than their enemies.

Of course if that were really true there would be a lot less of it.

And there you see the distinction between our feelings: had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out and drank his blood! But, till then - if you don’t believe me, you don’t know me - til then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair on his head!

Love takes a tumble.

You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!

Indeed. And who ever asked to be born?

[iambiguous]

[b]Jeanette Winterson

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.[/b]

This has never happened to me. But I’m never really sure: Is that a good thing?

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Some doors, some books.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.

Which is exactly what this is not.

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, “I fuck therefore I am”.

He thought: Let’s change the subject.

In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
Feel for yourself.

Now what, Henri?

When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me.
He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn’t want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.
It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left.
As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about being a new wall to replace the rotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it.
Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of the things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was no longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and gray like an old sweater you can’t throw out but won’t put on.
He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me.
Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don’t want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don’t know what to do, give me time.
Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution.
I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn’t use language to make a war-zone of my heart.
‘You’re so simple and good,’ he said, brushing the hair from my face.
He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic.
But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life
Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn’t be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love.
Medea did, I said, and Romeo and Juliet and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.
He asked me to shut up. He wasn’t a hero.
‘Then why should I be a heroine?’
He didn’t answer, he plucked at the blanket.
I considered my choices.
I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated.
I could leave and be unhappy and dignified.
I could Beg him to touch me again.
I could live in hope and die of bitterness.
I took some things and left. It wasn’t easy, it was my home too.
I hear he’s replaced the back fence.

I know: Who will play them in the movie? Now that it can’t be Brad and Angelina.

[iambiguous]

[b]E.M. Forster

Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.[/b]

Nope, not even in my dreams. But then that doesn’t really surprise you, does it?

Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.

In reality of course it is quite a bit more complicated.

It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.

At times [in particular] when you know it and they don’t.

A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

Me? Two out of four.

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die — I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there.

What to make of that. Though I suspect that it might be true.

I believe in aristocracy, though – if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.

Am I one of them? I think perhaps that I once used to be. Either way though I’m clearly destined for obscurity.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ernest Hemingway

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.[/b]

My guess: It never even occurs to them.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it—don’t cheat with it.

Whatever the fuck that means.

I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.

Actually, I pretty much did that myself.

…you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

Sometimes though who cares. As long as you can get away from them.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

It’s a good thing then they don’t really exist.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

To the best of my knowledge no one [and I mean no one] has ever said that about Baltimore. Of course I’m biased.

[iambiguous]

[b]André Gide

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.[/b]

Hundreds of times eventually.

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

Not counting all of the many, many things that really are.

Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.

Actually, I doubt that they give it much thought.

We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us.

Not to mention what’s worst in us. The part that others run the risk of crossing.

What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.

And how might that be different from a narrative of unhappiness?

The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered.

And then dutifully passed down to the next generation.

[iambiguous]

[b]Kate Chopin

There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.[/b]

Here we call them the Kids. Well, we being me.

There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don’t want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others.

Trust me though: It’s worth it.

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!

Ah, the beginning that never ends. At least for some of us, right?

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier’s mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Just imagine this: If we all did that!

Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.

Obviously: Too close to call.

She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency her thoughts, and stopped abruptly.

Would that this were the case more often. Here for example.

[iambiguous]

[b]Haruki Murakami

Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.[/b]

Unless, of course, it’s the only alternative.

Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven’t answered me.
I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world, I said after giving it some thought. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.
Midori rested an elbow on the bar and looked at me. There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I’m pretty sure.
People are strange when you’re a stranger.

And, as you might well imagine, few are stranger than me.

Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.

He means yours, Mr. Objectivist.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.

With other things though, it’s less confusing.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

And, if we’re lucky, only from the cradle to the grave.

When I wake up, my pillow’s cold and damp with tears. But tears for what? I have no idea.

That has never happened to me. But I know exactly what he means.

[iambiguous]

[b]Alan Moore

While a truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.[/b]

So choose wisely.

There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.

If even that.

Noise is relative to the silence preceeding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the peoples voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

Of course the people here just elected Donald Trump

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening. Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless.

Give or take the occasional ruling class. Or dictator.
For example…

Good evening, London. I would introduce myself, but truth to tell, I do not have a name. You can call me “V”. Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse. In anarchy, there is another way. With anarchy, from rubble comes new life, hope reinstated. They say anarchy’s dead, but see…reports of my death were…exaggerated. Tomorrow, Downing Street will be destroyed, the Head reduced to ruins, an end to what has gone before. Tonight, you must choose what comes next. Lives of our own, or a return to chains. Choose carefully. And so, adieu.

Trump being just the latest incarnation.

This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?

Well, you can always move.

[iambiguous]

[b]Richard Ford

First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.[/b]

More to the point [for some]: Did they get away with it?

I lie back on the bed and listen to the sounds of Easter—the optimist’s holiday, the holiday with the suburbs in mind, the day for all those with sunny dispositions and a staunch belief in the middle view, a tiny, tidy holiday to remember sweetly and indistinctly as the very same day through all your life.

On the count of three: Fuck Easter!

I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.

This then being passed down from one generation to the next. Until finally one of them blows the world up.

It’s shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.

And then go out and elect someone like Trump. Though not me of course.

It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.

Let’s figure out if this is true. You first.

Such narrowly missed human connection as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who’s at fault, and often results in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that ‘the whole goddamn thing’s not worth bothering with or it wouldn’t be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,’ after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.

Let’s figure out if this is true. You first.

[iambiguous]

[b]Orson Scott Card

Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.[/b]

Whereas the Communists would just order you to.
Right?

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

Imagine then “just living” virtually. As no doubt some of the Kids do here.

Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

And then it is up to each of us one by one to know where to draw the line.

Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner’s loss.

No getting around the selfish gene, is there?

Nobody’s life ever goes according to plan.
So why do we keep on planning?
Because that’s how we know who we are. By what we intend to be. By what we try to become.
And fail.
I don’t say ‘fail’. I say we aim and miss. But we still hit something.

Come on, there have to by any number of lives that go exactly to plan.
Don’t there?

…because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.

Let’s just hope under Trump it doesn’t actually come to that.

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

Anxiety: Fear of the unknown.
Depression: Fear of the known.[/b]

Obviously: Well put.

My capitalism ate my democracy.

In any event, that’s what we are about to find out.

Trump + Mitt Romney. Because what’s evil without banality.

One more thing I wish I had thought up first.
You know, if I believed in evil.

[b]Five Stages of Post-Election Grief:

1. Shock.
2. Denial.
3. Rage.
4. Acceptance.
5. Form cabinet and move into White House.[/b]

Indeed, there is always the possibility that Trump never actually thought that he would get elected.

ALT + RIGHT + DELETE

Rhymes with ALT + LEFT + DELETE

Society. My favorite failed social experiment.

Big time. For example, now.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Words never mean what we want them to mean.[/b]

Some don’t even mean what we think we want them to mean. Let alone what others think they think they want them to mean.

Why I’m Not Where You Are

In Twenty Five Words Or Less

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

There must be a hundred renditions of this. But there’s a reason for that, isn’t there?

I can forgive you for leaving, but not for coming back.

Fortunately or unfortunately [for me] no one ever did.

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

You start somewhere with something. What else is there?

Well, what I don’t get is why do we exist? I don’t mean how, but why. I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, we exist because we exist…we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.

Let’s file this one under, “as good an explanation as any”.
Unless of course you’ve got a better one, Mr. Objectivist.