Damn, she is smart. 
[b]Jeffrey Eugenides
Once you’ve visited the underworld, you never forget the way back.[/b]
And then one day you forget to leave.
They were moving along like that, each cupping a hold of the other. In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the beautiful and fortunate, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
And not just out in the heartland.
Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters’ inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.
And not just out in the heartland.
Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.
Not counting the time between spikes.
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the “Giulia” blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn’t remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.
Imagine that. No, really.
What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.
Worse, those who actually are. Or so it seems to those who aren’t.
[b]Lionel Shriver
For that matter, thinking of one’s self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.[/b]
Of course I really am. And, sure, you.
I am a bundle of other people’s histories, a creature of circumstance.
Daseinish as it were.
I am confessedly and unashamedly almost fifty years old and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.
He’ll get passed that. If he hasn’t already.
I didn’t put in my diaphragm, I mumbled, when we were through.
You stirred, Is it dangerous?
It’s very dangerous, I said.
Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.
Really, you just never know.
The gap between most people’s capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean.
Hell, I really wouldn’t know where to begin. Not counting all the times I have already failed.
But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules; nothing.
Silly rules. Sound familiar?
[b]Sad Socrates
I hate life but I love living.[/b]
Go figure…
Death is a synonym for the future.
Also: No exceptions.
The less I think, the more I exist.
Let’s just say that, sooner or later, it comes to this. Well, if you’re one of the lucky ones.
There will always be someone poorer and smarter than you.
Or [far more likely] richer and dumber.
What happens in reality doesn’t matter in reality.
Aside from all the things that do, sure.
We could all stand to be more wrong.
About the right things of course. And in the right order.
[b]Jim Harrison
If you live on the railroad tracks the train’s going to hit you, Grandpa used to say.[/b]
No wonder he’s lived so long.
All artists as a type seem to suffer a great deal, but then so do miners.
You know, just to put it in perspective.
One thing that has gone wrong in America is the general acceptance of bad ham.
Note to all you carnivors: Is this true?
He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn’t mind because he knew he had never been found.
I think I’ll try that.
Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery.
And, of course, religion. Still, a buck is a buck.
She was an asshole and I couldn’t have loved her at gunpoint.
Fortunately, love doesn’t work that way.
[b]Chuck Palahniuk
During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution.[/b]
No, really: huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/1 … 96207.html
If you ask me, people in hell just scream to hear their own voice and to pass time.
Sheer speculation, right?
No matter what happens, it’s always now.
Until it becomes before and after.
If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder.
Next up: The one who did it.
The old rule about how a thing of beauty is a joy forever, in my experience, even the most beauteous thing is only a joy for about three hours, tops.
Let’s synchronize our stopwatches.
As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that’s no guarantee you’ll create anything worth all your effort. You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.
So, is this more or less true of philosophers?
[b]Robert A. Heinlein
Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?[/b]
Whatever they can get away with?
Death isn’t funny.
Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.
Har Har Harr?
A motion to adjourn is always in order.
Just log out.
It seems to me that any law that is not enforced and can’t be enforced weakens all other laws.
Though no less bought and paid for.
Well, probably.
All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.
Of course it’s got to start somewhere. Besides, we all know where it ends.
The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
He wondered: Could there possibly be exceptions?
[b]Salman Rushdie
In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.[/b]
With obvious exceptions of course. If you know who I mean.
Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn’t matter; there were always more.
Indeed, millions and millions and millions more.
And my grandfather was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve.
A sort of leap of faith.
The actor’s life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.
Not counting the acting we do [and the masks we wear] just to survive.
The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.
I remember when I held to it…
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
Dance, sure. But armed to the teeth.
[b]Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.[/b]
I suspect it’s all for naught. Whatever that means.
Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.
Unless of course that’s just bullshit.
It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.
Manifest to some more than others let’s say.
It is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?
Let’s file this one under, “going nowhere fast”.
We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.
Mythological? Yep, that’s a good way to put it.
To the philosopher, infinity, knowledge, movement, empirical laws, etc., are things just as familiar {as family relations}. And as her dead brother and uncle are present to the peasant woman, thus Plato, Spinoza, etc. are present to the philosopher. The one has as much reality as the other, but the latter are immortal.
So to speak.
[b]Sigmund Freud
…public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.[/b]
Let’s come up with another word for that. 
There are no mistakes.
In, perhaps, a determined universe. Otherwise there are tons of them.
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
Tell that to my ego. And, no doubt, yours.
When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves.
Fuck the world in other words. But then one day the relationship is just…over.
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
This is true. Twice in my case.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
When [of course] it’s not the ability to wallow in it.
[b]Ian McEwan
When anything can happen, everything matters.[/b]
In other words, whatever the hell that means.
Who you get, and how it works out- there’s so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.
Or, given a miracle, it turns out happily.
…beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
And, as it turned out, either from the neck up or the neck down.
She bent her finger and then straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind.
Free will? The debate trudges on.
Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.
On the other hand, fuck marriage.
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
I challenge anyone to come up with one.
[b]Patricia Highsmith
They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.[/b]
And then the illusion that you ever really know yourself.
I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.
Love for example.
How easy it was to lie when one had to lie.
Or: How easy it was to lie period.
But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.
Imagine then how that must be for someone like “me”.
One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.
It either resonates or it doesn’t.
Honestly, I don’t understand why people get so worked up about a little murder!
Come on, we’ve all had that reaction to one or another killing.
[b]Robert Graves
Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.[/b]
That just about covers it, doesn’t it?
You know how it is when one talks of liberty. Everything seems beautifully simple. One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat.
Provided of course that you are one of us.
‘Genius’ was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one’s interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people’s uncertainties.
If you agree or disagree with this by all means let us know.
I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.
Let’s assume either for the better or the worse. In other words like most any place else.
I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.
Next up: I, Trump.
To resist the social pressure now put even on one’s leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one’s own way, than ever before.
A miracle is what it takes. And not just for the Kids these days.
[b]Ursula K. Le Guin
We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.[/b]
Anyone here disagree?
He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary…He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.
And now of course they have drones.
You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Fortelling?
No…
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
What we call philosophy.
The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.
I know: What was God thinking?
I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.
Obviously not a Trump supporter.
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
And fish aren’t the only ones.
[b]Existential Comics
Nietzsche might not have said “there are no facts, only interpretations” if he had known all of the terrible interpretations of him to come.[/b]
And not just the assholes at KT. You know, if they are assholes.
[b]Levels of class consciousness:
- Seeing class distinctions
- Understanding exploitation
- Correctly spell “bourgeoisie” on the first try[/b]
No, seriously, that’s what it’s come to.
Pessimist: the glass is half empty.
Optimist: yeah but at least what is left in the glass is alcohol.
Works the same for needles and heroin. Or so I’m told.
Humanity is:
Aristotle: the rational animal
Descartes: a soul and body
Sartre: transcendently free
Nietzsche: a bunch of goddamn idiot sheep
And folks wonder why Nietzsche is worshipped and adored!
Despair is:
Kierkegaard: a relation between finite and infinite
Schopenhauer: unrealised willing
Sartre: that Camus is more popular than me
And they’re all more popular than you and I. If dead of course.
Give a man a fish and feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and feed him for a life.
Hire a man to fish and exploit his labor for profit.
At least no one is enslaving him.
[b]Michael Cunningham
What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half.[/b]
Come on, you can have one without the other. At least I think you can.
You live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too.
And then it’s on to the next generation.
One often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be–capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you’ve ever imagined–it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you’ve left him that he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities…and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.
Few and far between to say the least, right?
The point of sex is…Sex doesn’t have a point.
Which is not to say however that it’s pointless.
She, Laura, likes to imagine…that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, it the other women aren’t all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty.
What do you think, men too?
…sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one’s own convictions.
He wondered: Is that before or after the part about dasein?
[b]Arundhati Roy
Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…[/b]
Of course Carl Sagan’s rendition was better.
It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.
Actually, I wouldn’t go quite that far.
Our dreams have been doctored. We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter…
Actually, I wouldn’t go quite that far.
To call someone ‘anti-American’, indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination.
Cue the terrorists?
Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them.
And let’s keep it that way, okay? Here I mean.
At times there’s something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take water away from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to bring water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?
Maybe it’s time for another revolution.
[b]The Dead Author
We have moved from “anyone but Trump” to “at least Trump isn’t the real Hitler”.[/b]
Tell that to his butler.
Religion: fear death.
Philosophy: fear life.
Either that or analyse it out of existence.
People keep blaming modern technology for causing them to be distracted, but never the things they want to be distracted from.
Not counting me, right?
Debates would be useful if people didn’t try to win them.
Or even think that some debates can be.
Simile: Life is like hell.
Metaphor: Life is hell.
Allegory: Hell.
Let’s make sense of this.
We live in a world where everybody is afraid of the days to come, but nobody can wait for the next Game of Thrones episode.
That’s the one with those ridiculous dragons, isn’t it?
[b]Anthony Burgess
The heresy of an age of reason, or some such slovos. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.[/b]
Also, with no God around to catch him.
Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.
A mere mortal coil as it were.
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
Assuming of course that is actually true.
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
No putting off that, right? Well, not forever.
You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.
Let alone the wrong one.
Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
Though [of course] not necessarily what others would call growing up.
[b]Jeffrey Eugenides
Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.[/b]
Hard to believe now of course.
Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.
And, for some, especially fates.
She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she liked to read. The university’s “British and American Literature Course Catalog” was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like “English 274: Lily’s Euphues” excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. “English 450A: Hawthorne and James” filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer in Danceteria. Even as a girl in their house in Prettrybrook, Madeleine wandered into the library, with its shelves of books rising higher than she could reach … and the magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.
Of course you can take this too far. Not that it will stop them.
Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.
Let’s just say you can find this out the hard way.
Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren’t about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against.
In the words, the rich fucking us all up the ass. But women in particular.
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions. Germanic traincar constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy”. I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
And that’s before you get to folks like Wittgenstein. Either that or after.