a thread for mundane ironists

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4161

[b]Lionel Shriver

That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn’t necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.[/b]

Seize the time blah blah blah.

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

That or breaking them. You know, for the 1%.

And of course Brian was far more upset about separation from those two blond moppets than about leaving Louise. There shouldn’t be any problem loving both, but for some reason certain men choose; like good mutual-fund managers minimizing risk while maximizing portfolio yield, they take everything they once invested in their wives and sink it into their children instead. What is it? Do they seem safer, because they need you? Because you can never become their ex-father, as I think I might become your ex-wife?

Yep, it’s all – all – just a matter of calculation these days.

But what’s so great about being a perfectionist? You do all this work, and then the stuff you’ve made just pisses you off.

In other words, like being anal. Only directed more at yourself.

You can only subject people who have a conscience to anguish. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.

Go ahead, lecture them about their moral responsibilities.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

I know what some of you are thinking: Is this still not bleak enough?

4162

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

There’s nothing more present than the ghosts of your past.[/b]

Me, I’m already contending with the ghosts of my future.

One of the hardest parts of life is deciding whether to walk away or run like hell.

Here you just click on “foe”.

Hurry up, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

And for them [of course] it was.

Life is a moment between a past you can’t afford and a future you don’t deserve.

Or a whole fucking bunch of them, right?

Ugly truth is just beauty out of focus.

It’s hard to imagine her out of focus. Right, Phyllo? :wink:

When you realise that your grandfather knows all the newest memes and you don’t.

Like it isn’t [almost] always the other way around.

4163

[b]Archibald MacLeish

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard – by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.[/b]

Just short of, say, plagiarizing.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

Not to mention the other way around.

The only thing about a man that is a man is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

Indeed, and we have a few of them here.

There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there’s now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.

So, go out and plant some. Now, goddammit!

A poem should not mean
But be.

A good one, hopefully.

Around, around the sun we go:
The moon goes round the earth.
We do not die of death:
We die of vertigo.

Staggering to the grave as it were.

4164

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

I’ve been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.[/b]

Not to worry. That stops once you die.

This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

Of course Kris Kristofferson had already pointed this out.

It’s not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.

And that’s before we get to the multiverse.

The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen.

Or a disaster that’s already been.

I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the savior who wants you to worship him forever.

Of course nowadays that’s normal.

No one wants to admit we’re addicted to music. That’s just not possible. No one’s addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can’t bear to be without it, but no, nobody’s addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted.

Let alone, say, pornography.

4165

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.[/b]

Or, as Mr. Zimmerman once opined: “Democracy don’t rule the world/You better get that through your head/This world is ruled by violence/But I guess that’s better left unsaid”

Were you born stupid, Heinrich, or did you have to study?

And not just Heinrich, right?

There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat.

Fortunately, philosophy isn’t one of them. Except technically.

People who are busy and happy don’t write diaries; they are too busy living.

So, is posting here too close to call?

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance.

Hmm. Are we stuck here or not?

I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.

My guess: No, he can’t.

4166

[b]The Dead Author

We’ve moved from “treat others like you want to be treated” (Jesus) to “act like it were to become the law” (Kant) to “don’t be an asshole”.[/b]

And even then [more often than not] tongue in cheek.

Tolstoy: You can’t change the world without changing yourself.
Dostoyevsky: You can’t change yourself without changing the world.

Obviously: Yes, no, maybe.

Cynicism: You can’t change the world.
Skepticism: You can’t change the world?
Sarcasm: You can change the world.

Obviously: Yes, no, maybe.

Elections have become a threat to democracy.

And not just this one.

The difference between hope and despair is a drink.

Or two as it were.

Everybody is an individualist when they succeed and a socialist when they fail.

I’ll bet that’s still true, isn’t it?

4167

[b]Salman Rushdie

All novelists know that crisis reveals character.[/b]

Either that or rips it to shreds. Or is that just “in reality”?

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2… priceless.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll assume he’s joking.

Please, Professor Solanka asked. Just tell me.
That’s the worst part, Dubdub said. There’s nothing to tell. No direct or proximate cause. You wake up one day and you aren’t a part of your life. You know this. Your life doesn’t belong to you. Your body is not, I don’t know how to make you this the force of this, yours. there’s just life, living itself. You don’t have it. You don’t have anything to do with it. That’s all. It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me. It’s like when you hypnotize someone and persuade them there’s a big pile of mattresses outside their window. They no longer see a reason not to jump.

I know, but what if this does make sense?

Fury…sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal…drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths.

So, the fury on display here: one or the other?

Rich kid, Shiva yelled, you don’t know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you’re rich and I’m poor? Where’s the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there’s a purpose! Man, I’ll tell you – you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That’s reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind!

Not at all sure what he means but it’s obviously true.

But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

Unless of course others are there to remind you. And not just me.

4168

[b]Leo Tolstoy

Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women. [/b]

I know: Imagine if he were around today.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.

Aside from being horseshit, this is probably true.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

And if you don’t have a soul?
True, it probably still works the same way.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…

Nowadays of course we call that a cliche.

Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!

Imagaine for example being both a Nazi and a Kantian.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

Or, more to the point, 1 part light and 3 parts shadow.

4169

[b]Sigmund Freud

The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.[/b]

Good luck trying to separate them.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

Right, like it would take a genius to figure that out.

What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.

Right, like it would take a genius to figure that out.

It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

Of course it goes without not saying too.

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

Now that explains a lot.

We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.

Translation: success if we prevail.

4170

[b]Ian McEwan

It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.[/b]

For some of us though it was common enough not to.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

Next up: Revenge.
Rational or not.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment’s thought, and that would take time.

You know, one of the games we play.

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

That’s why the snooze button was invented, right?

We knew so little about each other. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man’s privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element — Mind.

Of course there are less elegant ways in which to frame this.

He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.

Unless perhaps he was fated to never believe it.

4171

[b]Patricia Highsmith

The justice I have received, I shall give back.[/b]

If that’s an option of course.

A rush of panic comforted him with its familiarity.

How panicked could he have been then?

In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying, whom am I sleeping with these days? Franz Kafka.

Here of course we actually choose to surround ourselves with numbskulls. Virtually as it were. One click and they’re gone.

And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect.

Obviously: In her head.

…one blow in anger would kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

You wonder why this might occur to someone.

She tried to keep her voice steady, but it was pretense, like pretending self-control when something you loved was dead in front of your eyes. They would have to separate here.

Just click on “Add Foe”.

4172

[b]Existential Comics

Philosopher most likely to secretly be Batman: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Philosopher least likely to secretly be Batman: Thomas Nagel.[/b]

Let’s try and figure out why.

This work of philosophy was produced without conducting any dangerous thought experiments on animals.

You know, if that might have been a concern of yours.

An infinite number of philosophers imagine an infinite number of thought experiments. Each is more pointless than the last. The end.

The History Of Philosophy: Part 2

“What is your philosophy?”
“fox is the best animal”
“No, like…what is the meaning of life?”
“is it too late to change my answer to otter?”

Silly, sure, but no less astute.

I was unhappy with my life for a long time, so I decided to change nothing. I’m still unhappy, but at least I didn’t have to do anything.

Well, at least it’s logical. Or not of course.

The most important thing for a nihilist to not value is reading books. Because then they might discover how vapid their easy cynicism is.

Not counting me, right?

4173

[b]Thomas Harris

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.[/b]

An anti-hero if there ever was one! You know, like Satyr. :wink:

We can only learn so much and live.

One possible translation: Fuck philosophy!

Silence can mock.

Sure, if it’s loud enough.

We live in a primitive time—don’t we, Will?—neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

And, really, how much has changed?

I’m not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.

In other words, when you’re not creating it for others.
[the part he always leaves out]

I’m doing one of three things: I’m writing. I’m staring out the window. Or I’m writhing on the floor.

I know: In or out of the dungeon?

4174

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.[/b]

Millions and millions and millions of them as it were.

You don’t speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

I know: Let’s explore this metaphysically.

Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.

Of course that might just be all bullshit.

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn’t know where I was at all.

Can’t find a rock? No sweat. Just create a world of words.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!

Not all that far removed perhaps from “the horror, the horror”.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose… That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

In a heartbeat, right?

4175

[b]Ethicist For Hire

History of Philosophy:
Ancient: “What is the good life?”
Modern: “What is life?”
Today: “What is like to have a life?”[/b]

Next up: Death.

Heading to Germany to give a talk about Nihilism. Which I assume will be like heading to England to give a talk about Tea…

Me, I’d assume otherwise.

Teaching robots to be ethical is easy. It’s teaching ethicists to be ethical that’s hard…

You know, if not impossible.

Anti-Trump: “Trump is a Fascist!”
Pro-Trump: “Trump is a Fascist!”

Heads he wins, tails we lose. Unless of course it’s the other way arpound.

Never read article comments, or Youtube comments, or Facebook replies, or Twitter replies—
So what should I read online?
No one knows…

We do, right?

“I should be having fun!”
[Goes outside]
“I should be working!”
[Goes inside]
“I should never have been born!”
[Reads Schopenhauer]

Either him or Fernando Pessoa.

4176

[b]Michael Cunningham

Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings.[/b]

True, but few are willing to stop there.

It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.

A bit, well, preposterous?

Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways - you have not imagined the lives of others.

Of course that’s more or less the rule these days.

There’s no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.

On the other hand, I do all right with mine.

The book worm, the foreign-looking one with the dark, close set eyes an the Roman nose, who had never been sought after or cherished; who had always been left alone, to read.

Boy does that bring back memories.

Fearlessness in the face of your own ineptitude is a useful tool to have.

You wouldn’t think so, would you?

4177

[b]Arundhati Roy

…although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won’t.[/b]

Of course that only works for so long.

Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’etat—they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants.

Another way to look at it: youtu.be/YAlDbP4tdqc

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It’s like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That’s what is happening. We are being asked by the countries that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism - countries that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries - to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.

Yep, them global economy nihilists again.

Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

Not counting the ones that do of course.

They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.

You know, if they hailed from India.

Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion.

Not really, right?

4178

[b]Olivia Dresher

I risk it, telling the truth, rather than risk hiding it.[/b]

Her truth. Of course that’s the part she always misses.

How innocent we were, really, before the days of the Internet. Now it’s as if consciousness, itself, has changed.

On the other hand, A still equals A and 1 plus 1 still equals 2.

There are no more parachutes. There’s just the fall.

Over into the abyss for example.

I want to invent new words for all the words I overuse.

And then redefine them?

Everyone has their own individual disease of self. And everyone wants to hide their disease. That’s one aspect of the human condition.

Here you hide it or they “foe” you out of existence.

How easy it is to do things and how impossible to ever undo them.

Yep, that’s the trouble with being born. One of them.

[size=50][that’s all folks][/size]

4179

[b]Walker Percy

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.[/b]

On the other hand, my business is dasein. And who wants to talk about that.

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

Especially if it dawned on him in, say, elementary school.

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Aside from the morons who insist that they do.

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but–” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However–” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord.

So, what’s that make this place then?

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

Yep, that’s how it works sometimes.

Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

And that’s not easy to do. Or it wasn’t for me.

4180

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.[/b]

Well, actually, a relatively new thing.

In between calls, she lay on her side, thinking about calling.

Yes, there really are people like this.

She was always saying, ‘Fuck this school,’ or ‘I can’t wait until I get out of here.’ But so did lots of kids.

And then after school: “Fuck this job.”

She leaned toward him and said in a quiet voice, “Are you Christian?”
Mitchell hesitated to answer. The worst thing about religion was religious people.

There’s always only one right answer here. Well, most of the time.

This is my country, Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached under the counter and produced a pistol.

If not a machine gun.

Given the choice, a yeast cell’s ideal state is to be diploid. But if it’s in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens? The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids. Because, in a crisis, it’s easier to survive as a single cell.

Divided we stand!