a thread for mundane ironists

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4201

[b]Excistential Comics

Damn kids these days with their fancy epistemological theories, back in my day knowledge was justified true belief and we liked it that way![/b]

Not to be confused with the Kids here of course. Unless you count Turd. :wink:

Nietzsche said “that which does not kill you makes you stronger”, but then he got syphilis and could hardly walk anymore…

So much for the “will to power”.

I went to a nihilist therapist. He explained that it didn’t matter if I was depressed. I explained that it didn’t matter if I paid him.

To be continued. Or not as it were.

People say philosophy is useless to study, but the paradox is that the only way to find out if that’s true is by studying philosophy.

The mother of all paradoxes?

Remember, always trust your intuitions. The other day I had an intuition that my intuitions were super trustworthy, so that’s how I know.

A bit tautological, but so much is these days.

Maybe if I buy enough books and put them on my shelf I’ll be able to find time to read.

Or [more to the point] others will think that you have.

4202

[b]William Gaddis

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.[/b]

Bliss? Yeah, I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Though there are others.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of…recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it…

Everybody as in almost nobody.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

Because they are not who we want them to be either.

Merry Christmas! the man threatened.

Or: Happy New Year! the man threatened. A lot worse, right?

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

Another fucking brick in another fucking wall, as Pink Floyd once observed.

…mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

And not just on Wall Street. Or not anymore.

4203

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.[/b]

Like, for example, life itself.

We are all connected on the inside. Your ass is just the far end of your mouth.

That can get confusing, right?

Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self portrait. Everything is a diary.

Hmm. That probably includes our posts here.

My stomach hurts, but if it’s guilt or impacted stool, I can’t tell. Either way, I’m so full of shit.

And, for many, then some.

Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven’t already done…

Must be a subsection of the first rule from the film.

The bad news is we don’t have any control.
The good news is we can’t make any mistakes.

I know: What if this is really true?

4204

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

It’s better to copulate than not.[/b]

Remember when that used to be true?

Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive.

And then, failing that, to commit suicide.

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them.

See, they don’t call them reactionaries for nothing.

Audacity, always audacity - soundest principal of strategy.

Not counting all the times it’s not.

It’s not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth — but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it…but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.

Of course that was before Kant. And, sure, after.

The whole principle of censorship is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.

Take heed of that, Mr. Moderator. Though of course he never will.

4205

[b]Salman Rushdie

Once the god-squad supreme, she was now possessed of the zeal of the apostate and came on like an atheistic stormtrooper.[/b]

At least she’s still in the game.

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

Some obviously more enslaved than others.

I’ll tell you a secret about fear: it’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot’s fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage’. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.

Trust me: Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. In other words, as always, it’s about options. Having them for example.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

And [hopefully] not get banned.

When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to try to be a full-time writer.’ Oh, his boss said, you want a lot more money. ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a negotiation. I’m just giving you my thirty days’ notice. Thirty-one days from now, I won’t be coming in.’ Hmm, his boss replied. I don’t think we can give you as much money as that.

This ever happen to you? No, I didn’t think so.

In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.

Probably true but most of us will take our chances.

4206

[b]The Dead Author

No choice is so obvious that you can’t regret it later.[/b]

I know: Too many to count.

Russia has the darkest novelists, Germany the darkest philosophers, and America the darkest clichés.

For example: Don’t forget to vote!

If you ever don’t know what to write, remember that Homer wrote only two poems in his lifetime, and those were probably not his.

He thought: Homer Simpson wrote poems?

Reading is important not because it makes you smart but because it makes you realize that you’re not.

But only if you don’t read the right books.

When people call someone a “nihilist”, what they really mean is “doesn’t believe in the same thing as me.”

As you might imagine, I get that a lot.

Every online discussion: “This is obvious bullshit! Not worth talking about.”
[12 hours of arguing]
“Like I said, totally obvious bullshit!”

Time to lock it? :wink:

4207

[b]Leo Tolstoy

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class – herself alone – had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.[/b]

All the boys in the world too no doubt.

If you love me as you say you do, she whispered, make it so that I am at peace.

I’'ll bet that shut him up.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

And then, say, snowball?

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

In other words, take that as you will.

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

I would say “no shit” but, sure, it might not be true.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

Until someone invented a world of words. Problem solved. You know, for the time being.

4208

[b]Sigmund Freud

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less “perfect”.[/b]

Otherwise known as psycho-babble. At least to the masses.

A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.

In other words, whatever that means.

If children could, if adults knew.

Just ominous enough to give us pause.

…we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay…from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men… This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other.

Cheers!

He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.

In fact you can die waiting.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.

Or: Man has, as it were, become a kind of pathetic God.

4209

[b]Ian McEwan

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.[/b]

Not to worry: There’s always the next one.

The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.

You know, if they really are amazing.

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

Obviously not an objectivist.

Something has happened, hasn’t it? … It’s like being up close to something so large you don’t even see it. Even now, I’m not sure I can. But I know it’s there.

And then one day you can’t miss it. But you always do.

He’s feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It’s a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit’s grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. Everyone fears it, but there’s also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don’t let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it’s happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know.

Today, Orlando. The other Orlando.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?

Not counting the kids who never really have one.

4210

[b]Patricia Highsmith

I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.[/b]

Or [of course] until death do ye part.

There were many times when logic was of no comfort.

In other words, quite the contrary.

A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use of debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game — or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I’ll leave that to the philosophers.

So, are we up to the task?

January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory.

On the other hand, not all Januarys are created equal.

She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

And not just in Orlando

There was something demoniacal and insuperable about typographical errors, as if they were part of the natural evil that permeated man’s existence, as if they had a life of their own and were determined to manifest themselves no matter what, as surely as weeds in the best-tended gardens.

See for example the Wicked Bible: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible

4211

[b]Thomas Harris

There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named – the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.[/b]

Practically everyday here, right?

What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection, Dr. Bloom said. He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.

If not all the way down.

What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.

Or [of late] posting at ILP.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom.

Like [in the end] it matters anyway.

Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in Heaven, made to kiss God’s ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion.

You know, if you can talk yourself into believing it.

In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night light; she knew of that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way that everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering, "Is this all?”

Either that or hoping it is.

4212

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.[/b]

Too cynical…or not cynical enough?

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

All the way to the White House.

What is life without incompatible realities?

An illusion?

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

After idealism in other words.

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

Mindlessly as it were.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

You stop being one of them and start to become one of others.

4213

[b]Existential Comics

It sucks that Bernie Sanders lost. And to think, we were this close to establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.[/b]

I knew it!

“It’s like how Eskimos have 100 words for snow.”
“Actually that’s a myth.”
“Fine, it’s like how Americans have 100 words for profit.”

And that’s just the ones that start with vowels.

I have ennui.
What’s that?
It’s when you are depressed, but not so depressed that you’ve given up on being pretentious.

I must have the other ennui then.

The history of philosophy is basically just a bunch of old dudes saying how the last old dude was wrong about everything.

Or, okay, almost everything.

[b]You are on a runaway trolley, you:

  1. Kill one person
  2. Kill five people
  3. Write a strongly worded letter to whoever designed the brakes[/b]

And then, sure, kill him.

Odds of us living in a simulation: 99%
Odds of us not knowing the odds of us living in a simulation: 100%

That can’t be good.

4214

[b]Michael Cunningham

Who wouldn’t want to fuck these people up? Which of us does not understand, in our own less presentable depths, the demons and wizards compelled to persecute human mutations clearly meant, by deities thinking only of their own entertainment, to make almost everyone feel even lonelier and homelier, more awkward, more doubtful and blamed, than we actually are?[/b]

Human mutations. Actually, You gotta love 'em.

Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what’s already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.

Just not at this particular time. At least I hope not.

Beauty is a whore. I prefer money.

Nowadays you almost have to.

There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lived seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

And this too shall pass…

Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he’s considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?

Of course anyone can become a philosopher. Or [here] call himself one.

He’s filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.

Childish to say the least.

4215

[b]Arundhati Roy

They were all there (at the airport) - the deaf ammoomas, the cantankerous, arthritic appoopas, the pining wives, scheming uncles, children with the runs. The fiancées to be reassessed. The teacher’s husband still waiting for his Saudi visa. The teacher’s husband’s sisters waiting for their dowries. The wire-bender’s pregnant wife. “Mostly sweeper class,” Baby Kochamma said grimly, and looked away while a mother, no wanting to give up her good place near the railing, aimed her distracted baby’s penis into an empty bottle while he smiled and waved at the people around him…[/b]

I know: Kind of hard to believe. Or even to imagine.

DB: There’s a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it’s become almost an obsession for the media in the United States. But it’s a very narrow definition of terrorism.
AR: Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war - people who believe that it isn’t only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well. If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama bin Laden is making people pay for the actions of the US state, whether it’s in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The US government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same. Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush, with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al Qaeda.

Next up: Connecting these dots to Orlando. Sort of.

And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.

The shot callers as it were.

Isn’t there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn’t know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth.

And why not, they created it. Though not always out of thin air.

Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

No beast thinks to.

Democracy is the Free World’s whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes.

Anything for a buck?

4216

[b]Walker Percy

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.[/b]

Or [sometimes] the despair when you find it.

Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions. No orgies, no blood running in the street, no babies thrown off cliffs. No, we’re sentimental people and we horrify easily. True, our moral fiber is rotten. Our national character stinks to high heaven. But we are kinder than ever. No prostitute ever responded with a quicker spasm of sentiment when our hearts are touched. Nor is there anything new about thievery, lewdness, lying, adultery. What is new is that in our time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be congratulated by the great public, if their confession is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and authentic note of sincerity. Oh, we are sincere. I do not deny it. I don’t know anybody nowadays who is not sincere.

He thought: Thank God for Dr. Phil.
Or is it Jerry Springer?
Oprah?

I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. I can’t stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.

Going all the back to the caves one suspects.

Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant’s son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.

That’s now spread North of course. All the way to Canada by now.

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second’s glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

Well, as a man once said, hell is other people.

What do you seek–God? you ask with a smile.
I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount to setting myself a goal which everyone else has reached–and therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest interest. Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics–which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker. For myself, I enjoy answering polls as much as anyone and take pleasure in giving intelligent replies to all questions.
Truthfully, it is the fear of exposing my own ignorance which constrains me from mentioning the object of my search. For, to begin with, I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?
On my honor, I do not know the answer.

If only he were still around to discuss this…here?

4217

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.[/b]

In other words, if we’re lucky.

Parties bring my misantrophy into focus.

Mine too. But only if there are people there.

It was like that Talking Head song. "And you may ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’ … And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful wife’”. As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical applications. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.

Obviously not a philosophy major.

One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain’t something you just get off of. You can’t get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. It always be there, though.

So true. Been depressed – really depressed – twice. And I have the scars to prove it.

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”
Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar’s dirty hand.
Mike said, I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it’s hopeless. It never stops.
Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you, Mitchell said.
Yeah, well, Mike said, obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.

He’s saving that for the Second Coming. At least that’s what my source here tells me.

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again.

Right.

4218

Is not life an irony at times? #-o

…but where does the mundane come in?

4219

Hmm…

As I recall this forum was once called “mundane babble”.

4220

wrong thread