a thread for mundane ironists

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4321

[b]Ian McEwan

The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.[/b]

Too much I. As in I am going to die.

Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?

And don’t ever count on figuring it out. Even if in fact you’re almost certainly not.

It’s hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self.

Not that any of you do.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

Trust me: it’s in there somewhere.

There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.

Or, if you prefer, don’t make something and die.

The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.

Almost as though it had a mind all its own.

4322

[b]Michio Kaku

These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn’t melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits.

It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.[/b]

Thanks to God, right? And, with any luck, ours.

…when a person tells a lie, he simultaneously has to know the truth, concoct the lie, and rapidly analyze the consistency of this lie with previously known facts.

Let’s just file this one under, “no sweat”.

As Sir William Osler once said, “The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.”

Meanwhile the fucking objectivists still come and go.

I once wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, called Einstein’s Cosmos, and had to delve into the minute details of his private life. I had known that Einstein’s youngest son was afflicted with schizophrenia, but did not realize the enormous emotional toll that it had taken on the great scientist’s life.

From the Big Bang to schizophrenia. Go figure.

Using MRI scans, scientists can now read thoughts circulating in our brains. Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer.

Right, and who foots the bill?

One day, would it be possible to walk through walls? To build starships than can travel faster than the speed of life? To read other people’s minds? To become invisible? To move object with the power of our minds? To transport our bodies instantly through outer space?? Since I was a child , I’ve always been fascinated by these questions.

And [of course] as with the rest of us, he will no doubt no to the grave, shall we say, unapprised.

4323

[b]Tiny Nietzsche

I am waiting for a superhero who minds their fucking business.[/b]

Seriously, is there one?

I finally finished the book I didn’t like.

It could be worse: writing the book you didn’t like.

note to self: et tu?

And why not, it has a mind all its own.

…voids with benefits…

Though [off the top of my head] I can’t think of one.

I understand me, I suppose.

Or not, I suppose.

Today is yesterday’s tomorrow. Don’t fuck it up.

Or, in any event, not day after day after day after day.

4324

[b]Hilary Mantel

But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?[/b]

Hmm. Let me think about that…

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

I’m inclined to agree. You know, with both of them.

With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’. Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says ‘Pope’.

Still, if nothing else, religion involves reading between the lines. A certainty if there ever was one.

Not a word, not a word of love. Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all. He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch.

Like I always say, anything can be rationalized.

Feminism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.

Lots of “isms” like right, aren’t there?

I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was.

Besides, it’s never in the same place twice, is it?

4325

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.[/b]

Well, one of the dangers, sure.

But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia.

You’d think the implications of this would be obvious. But it almost never is. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.

You’d think the implications of this would be obvious. But it almost never is. Right, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.[/b]

Me too. I’m doing it all wrong. But I do own a gun. And I know how to use it.

It is very seldom, the young man said at last, that dragons ask to do men favours.
But it is very common, said the dragon, for cats to play with mice before they kill them.

Still, no dragons around here, right?

The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.

Yep, them and turds.

4326

[b]so sad today

i never liked myself: a love story[/b]

In ten volumes.
So far.

50 shades of get me out of here

And by here I mean there too.

i never don’t think i’m dying

Well, maybe once or twice.

i don’t think we get the dick we think we deserve

I know: nor the pussy.

cause of death: everything

Yeah, that too.

by happy i mean moderately depressed

On the good days for example.

4327

[b]Paula Hawkins

It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers.[/b]

That really does exist, doesn’t it?

I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. It’s true.

In other words, ever and always be your own best friend.

Who’s to say that once I run, I’ll find that isn’t enough? Who’s to say I won’t end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I’ll want to run again, and again, and eventually I’ll end up back on those old tracks, because there’s nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don’t you?

Oh yeah.

It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?

Let’s file this one [again] under, “been there, done that”.

It broke me and I broke us.

Collateral damage as it were.

She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before. She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did.

Some but not others. And isn’t that the way it’s always been?

4328

[b]Tony Kushner

We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do.[/b]

Sounds about as plausable as it doesn’t.

Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?

Choose one:
­­___ Trump’s justice
___ Clinton’s justice
___ What’s the difference?
You know, if you’re a Berniac.

It can be very hard to accept how disappointing life is, Harper, because that’s what it is, and you have to accept it. With faith and time and hard work you reach a point where . . . where the disappointment doesn’t hurt as much, and then it gets easy to live with. Quite easy. Which is in its own way a disappointment. But. There.

Or: But. Not. There.

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course—arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it’s hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom.

In other words, truth here being entirely relative.

She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was . . . (He touches the coffin) . . . not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.

Still not melting all that much is it? In, for example, Copland.

They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench—Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine.

So, don’t forget to vote. You know, one way or the other.

4329

[b]Paul Bowles

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.[/b]

Waxing philosophical [yet again] about death.

The soul is the weariest part of the body.

With any luck though you may not even have one.

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we’re just so small.

Tiny beyond words, as it were.

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.

Yep, always wanted to be one of those.

[b]When I was young…before I was twenty, I mean…I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth. She hesitated.

Port laughed abruptly. And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then’s when you’re conscious of the bitter taste.[/b]

Then the part where it’s all just ashes.

Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.

Or a delusion.
Like, for instance, God.

4330

[b]Walker Percy

A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.[/b]

If only [here] “in your head”.

What nuns don’t realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits.

One man’s rather stupid opinion.

Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.

It might be particularly difficult to demonstrate this though.

My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language–you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing–and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

The weird world of words on steroids.

What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

Let’s speculate on what Descartes doesn’t know [or isn’t conscious of] now.

My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it’s poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know.

Of course “in theory” almost anything is true about art. However “in reality” it doesn’t have to be.

4331

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

“lol” is the scariest number[/b]

Why? Because it’s somewhere between 0.999 and 1.

Ready, set, don’t go.

Only faster this time.

When running away from yourself doesn’t help, try dancing away.

Unless, of course, you have two left feet.

All people are different, so you’re just like anyone else.

Shit. Hadn’t thought of that.

My fingers miss rotary phones.
My memory misses not knowing who’s calling.

Not many like that left around.

There’s a special place in hell called “Our Future.”

In other words, you don’t even have to die first.

4332

[b]Marquis de Sade

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.[/b]

Sure, as long as you don’t get caught. Something not at all applicable to the Nile though, right?

What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

Remember when that used to be true? Unless of course it still is.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding Hell.

But that would make God a “loser”, right Ierrellus? :wink:

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.

Until one day [for some] the imagining part just isn’t enough.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

That is until [either here or there] they become the brutal reality.

Sex without pain is like food without taste.

That’s bullshit of course. Unless you actually believe it.

4333

[b]Haruki Murakami

The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.[/b]

In other words, dream on.

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

Cue God.
Really, what else is there?

“For a while” is a phrase whose length can’t be measured.

On the other hand, has anyone ever tried?

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.

Though I am able to muddy the water considerably here. Unless of course I’m not.

Sometimes I feel so - I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going.
Like a little lost Sputnik?
I guess so.

I guess so too.

As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.

No getting around that, is there?

4334

[b]so sad today

confuse me like you mean it[/b]

And you do mean it, right?

i keep meaning to be a different person

Or at least not the same person twice.

who are these people that just ‘forget to eat’

Or [here] who are these people that just ‘forget to think’.

i either think about you or think about death

Though increasingly they do overlap.

“all that running around for nothing” --my tombstone

Or, sure, they can spell it out in your ashes.

it’s all fun and games until you’re born

Actually, I don’t remember that at all.

4335

[b]Joseph Brodsky

What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.[/b]

The human condition in a nutshell perhaps?

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.

And by objects that means subjects too.

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those–in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can’t escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists…

True, but these things are often beyond our control. Or beyond mine certainly.

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

Not many jobs like that though, are there?

…boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life—the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. ‘You are finite,’ time tells you in a voice of boredom, ‘and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.’ As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.

Either that or the other way around.

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

Small wonder. Yep, that just about covers it.

4336

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

People in France have a phrase: “Spirit of the Stairway.” In French: esprit d’Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it’s too late. So you’re at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party . . .

As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should’ve said. The perfect crippling put down. That’s the Spirit of the Stairway.[/b]

Probably works the same way here. If not throughout the entire universe.

Now is the autumn of our ennui.

Actually, now is the winter of mine.

Given the choice between grabbing a strange tongue and watching a monster poop into a giant snail shell, the face retreats and slams the door behind it.

On the other hand, how likely is that?

We’ve been speaking English as a second language so long that we’ve forgotten it as our first.

Does that mean what I think it does?

What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.

Hell, you can even believe that it’s triue.

What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?

Again in other words.

4337

[b]Orson Scott Card

Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.[/b]

As you might imagine, that’s not really a problem for me.

If you try and lose then it isn’t your fault. But if you don’t try and we lose, then it’s all your fault.

Try to avoid that of course.

I don’t care if I pass your test, I don’t care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly. I’ll beat you unfairly first.

No getting around that. Not in this world.

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

Me, I question them for you.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

Cue Nicholas Urfe.

When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.

Though I’m the exception, right?

4338

[b]Richard Yates

Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn’t that the God damndest thing?[/b]

Lots of folks like that, aren’t there?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Even more to actually do something about it.

You still felt that life was passing you by?
Sort of. I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I’d suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I’d been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they’d know it too.

You know, like it was back in the fabulous fifties.

Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it. Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time—this was the hell of it—who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him. It was as ludicrous and as simple as that.

Still, it’s better than living in some Third World hellhole.

…his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.

In other words, if you’re lucky enough to have one.

…you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together in this thing” when you meant the very opposite … and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that?

And living on Revolutionary Road no less!

4339

[b]Leo Tolstoy

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.[/b]

Emphasis mine.

…everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.

This of course is patently absurd. We all agree on that, right?

When one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep over one’s hair!

Or anything else for that matter.

Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn’t my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don’t really feel, of understanding things I don’t understand, being able to do things I’m not able to.

There must be at least a dozen renditions of this from a dozen great minds.

Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?

There must be at least a dozen renditions of this from a dozen great minds.

The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.

Or [here] debunking the alleged truth of others.

4340

[b]Existential Comics

It’s important to study all systems of ethics, so you can pick which one best justifies whatever you want to do in a particular situation.[/b]

Of course that’s just understood here, isn’t it?

In a way it’s kind of fitting that the term “postmodernism” has been used in so many contradictory ways that it’s become almost meaningless.

You know, like “nihilism”.

Life is super short, which is why I make sure to spend like 99% of it doing stupid bullshit that I don’t even care about.

It’s about time someone updated it.

It’s nice to have facts and solid reasoning on your side, but it’s a good thing emotion is always there to back you up, just in case.

Indeed, the all-encompassing first person subjunctive point of view.

I don’t know how my ancestors survived, frankly. I can’t even sleep if it is like one degree hotter than usual.

Postmodern angst. Sort of.

Learn to argue against the best version of the opponent’s argument. You won’t win as many arguments against idiots, but you’ll think better.

Who’d like to try it against mine? Turd, perhaps? :laughing: