a thread for mundane ironists

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4341

[b]Randall Munroe

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.[/b]

We’ll probably never know though.

Sure, we seem like we’ve taken over the planet, but if I had to bet on which one of us would still be around in a million years—primates, computers, or ants—I know who I’d pick.

The dumb fucking ants, right?

In the Clarendon Library at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.

Sure, it might be true.

While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, “Calculating how many rental helium tanks you’d have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft.

Sure, it might be true.

Without us, Earth’s geology will grind on. Winds and rain and blowing sand will dissolve and bury the artifacts of our civilization. Human-caused climate change will probably delay the start of the next glaciation, but we haven’t ended the cycle of ice ages. Eventually, the glaciers will advance again. A million years from now, few human artifacts will remain.

You know, just to put things in perspective scientifically.

I still don’t know whether there are more hard or soft things in the world.

That makes two of us.

4342

[b]Ian McEwan

She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply - notions as self evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with courage to confront him.[/b]

The good old days for some.

She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn’t there somewhere else for people to go?

Dope comes closest. Or it always has for me.

What I took to be the norm – taut, smooth, supple – was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes.

Or [sooner or later] dinosaurs.

Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great dsitance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another.

Right, from a great distance…

What could you do with a single piece of jigsaw? But, on the other hand, did you dare throw it away?

In a heartbeat. Unless, of course, there’s a deeper meaning.

… he felt unusually warm toward humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was.

That’s what we are reduced to, isn’t it? Or he was.

4343

[b]Tiny Nietzsche

I can’t believe I’m the future.[/b]

So don’t be.

I know a lot of strangers.

Can they say the same thing about you?

I’ve discovered a plot to kill myself slowly over the years.

Incredibly, it started on the day he was born.

Funny how I can’t remember my own death yet.

Funny how it occurred to him at all.

make tomorrow today again

Or: make today yesterday again.

Some people like august. They are wrong.

There are 12 renditions of this, aren’t there?

4344

[b]Michio Kaku

Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields.[/b]

Akin, one suspects, to “beam me up, Scotty”

“I canna’ change the laws of physics, Captain!” – Scotty, chief engineer in Star Trek

Indeed, and that’s what he would say to Kirk’s command to beam him up. I mean, come on!

…the entire electromagnetic spectrum— from radar to TV, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays— is nothing but Maxwell waves, which in turn are vibrating Faraday force fields.

Obviously.

The point is: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time. That’s the Cave Man Principle.

In other words [time after time] so much for civilization.

There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society.

So, don’t forget to vote!

As in the movie The Matrix, we might one day be able to download memories and skills using computers.

Or one day we might not.

4345

[b]Hilary Mantel

If a man spoke to you in that tone, you’d invite him to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat.[/b]

Could be anywhere in the world, right?

Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don’t give a fourpenny fuck.

Could be anywhere in the world, right?

Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them.

Maybe, but will it work on Trump?

He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, ‘You prick.’

Either that or, ‘You dickhead’.

There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.

With a lot to choose from when you’re pissed off.

Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.

You know, the part where you follow the money. And not just to Wall Street.

4346

[b]The Dead Author

Time to return to the time-tested, bloodless way of destroying democracy. Elections.[/b]

We have one of those now, don’t we?

Books took so long to read that we didn’t have time to write. So we created the internet where you write so much, you have no time to read.

Well, it’s probably for the best, I suppose.

Things get better once you accept that they won’t.

Not really though, right?

There is always a good reason not to do something. So don’t.

I just did.

Anything is more complicated than you’d think, and easier than other people say.

Or certainly somewhere in between.

Nobody is right but not everybody is equally wrong.

Yeah, that’ll work for me. Or at least until it doesn’t.

4347

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.[/b]

Actually, it’s just too close to call.

…a book is a box of words until you open it.

Okay, you open it. Then what?

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

Or [more to the point perhaps]: The only answers that really matter are the ones you tell yourself.

…if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

Indeed, tell me that is not exactly the way it works here.

A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I know they don’t read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literature—realism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey.

I like where she’s going with this. Being “a space-ship stuff” enthusiast myself.

[b]Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.[/b]

Oh, I live there alright. Just no less reluctantly.

4348

[b]Paula Hawkins

Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again.[/b]

I know: That could never happen to you.

I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.

Not counting self-pity. Look, you either learn that or you don’t.

…the sense of shame I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who witnessed it.

Well, that’s more or less as as it ought to be. If shame’s your thing.

And they are a partnership. I can see it, I know how they are. His strength, that protectiveness he radiates, it doesn’t mean she’s weak. She’s strong in other ways; she makes intellectual leaps that leave him openmouthed in admiration. She can cut to the nub of a problem, dissect and analyse it in the time it takes other people to say good morning. At parties, he often holds her hand, even though they’ve been together years. They respect each other, they don’t put each other down.

Nope, never met that one.

Sometimes I feel like seeing if I can track down anybody from the old days, but then I think, what would I talk to them about now?

And, sure, no doubt about it: that’s what they’re thinking about you.

I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that’s it. I’m awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

Time to rethink the other option.

4349

[b]Paul Bowles

Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.[/b]

Obviously: Some illnesses more than others.

He awoke, opened his eye. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. … In utter comfort, utter relaxation he lay absolutely still for a while, and then sank back into on the the light momentary sleeps that occur after a long, profound one.

The Snooze Button Syndrome. And never less than an hour every morning.

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

Not many of us can say that, right? On the other hand, how many of us would want to?

The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.

And thus was born the expression, “you can count them on one hand”.

One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and fatal, that there never would be a return, another time.

Unless of course one didn’t.

We’ve never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We’re hanging on to the outside for all we’re worth, convinced we’re going to fall off at the next bump.

Bumps. Tell me about them.

4350

[b]Walker Percy

The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension–and that is the sign-user himself…The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.[/b]

This part: “I”. Apprehended through an existential mechanism I call “dasein”.
I know, I know: signifying next to nothing at all.

An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond. But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed.

Not to be confused with “I”. Unless of course it’s the same thing.

Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: ‘Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.’ Explain your emotion.

Wow! That’s a tough one!

Question (The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in (a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man- and womankind will make love and not war? or (b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of life and in ordinary intercourse with others, is now disappointed even in the erotic, its last and best hope, and so erupts in violence–and in that very violence which is commensurate with the orgastic violence in the best days of the old erotic age–i.e., war?

Cue [among others] Karl Marx.

[b]Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe–that’s all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker?

But what if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there’s a mystery. People would sit up and take notice. I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me.

In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God’s existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God!

I’m serious. When was the last time you saw a sin? Oh, you’ve seen quite a few? Well, I haven’t, not lately. I mean a pure unadulterated sin. You’re not going to tell me that some poor miserable slob of a man who beats up his own child has committed a sin?

You don’t look impressed. Yes, you know me too well. I was only joking. Well, half joking.[/b]

Shall we start a new thread?

[b]Starting point for search:

It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God.

Yet it is impossible to rule God out.

The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one’s own invincible apathy - that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all.

Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto him.[/b]

If God is proved to exist, I’ll change. You know, if He’ll have me.

4351

[b] Nein

It turns out there is something better than reading Vonnegut as an angry teenager: reading Vonnegut as a disappointed adult.[/b]

Not the same thing at all, is it? And then one day you stop reading him altogether.

Your state of emergency? Or mine?

I’ll flip you for it.

Bartleby, the Lacanian.

Wow, never thought of that. Nor, I suspect, did Melville.

Where were you when the world was playing Pokemon Go, they’ll ask. On Twitter, we’ll say.

On the contrary, we were right here, weren’t we?

In other news: it’s not all bad. It’s worse.

So, don’t forget to vote!

Yes, August, we know. Every month is the cruelest.

Not to mention every year.

4352

[b]Marquis de Sade

You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being,the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to. For my system, which you disapprove of is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness -it means more to me than my life itself.[/b]

Okay, Mr. Deontologist, have a go at it.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

Much as liberty at the expense of social order is hardly a bargain. I mean, come on, has it ever not been that way?

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

In other words, in his own way, he was just one more fucked up objectivist.

I don’t know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind’s frailties.

Or: I don’t know what the mind is, not I: I only use the word to denote the heart’s frailties. Then you just choose sides.

It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns.

But then it all comes down to options. Some have them, some don’t.

True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.

Sure, I can live with that.

4353

[b]Haruki Murakami

Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.[/b]

Of course you have to be seventeen when you die

A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

Hard to actually pin down though I suspect.

Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.

Doesn’t leave much in this day and age does it?

I’m a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

Or: I’m a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like philosophy.

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

You know, if that’s important to you.

…there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

He thought: Any day now.

4354

[b]Ethicist For Hire

Hasn’t neuroscience proven that traditional philosophy is obsolete?
Can an MRI define ‘proven’?
No.
Then philosophy’s not obsolete…[/b]

I know: define “obsolete”.

How much this won’t blow your mind will blow your mind!

So, did it?

Husserl: Hey can you explain something to me?
Heidegger: No. Only description is possible.
Husserl: Your training is now complete…

So, is it?

Have you ever done anything supererogatory?
Well I deconstructed the concept of duty…

Maybe, but is that supererogatory enough?

“I’ve heard this sort of speech a lot in the last 15 years and trust me, it doesn’t sound any better in Russian.” Gary Kasparov

Bingo: Trump at the RNC.

Then: “Explain philosophy in your own words, or you don’t understand it.”
Now: “Explain philosophy in emojis, or you don’t understand it.”

Bottom line: The Kids take over. And, no, not just here.

4355

[b]Joseph Brodsky

The longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.[/b]

You know, in a perfect world.

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.

Still, I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.

Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.

Not counting the actual assholes.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.

Talk about below the belt! Unless there’s another one.

…and love, as an act, lacks a verb.

And in no way is that an easy task.

The Constitution doesn’t mention rain.

Hmm. Anyone here know why?

4356

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

It’s eerie, but what’s happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends.[/b]

On the other hand, does anything ever really not end?

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That’s how beautiful she looks.

Ironically as it were.

Since change is con­stant, you won­der if peo­ple crave death be­cause it’s the on­ly way they can get any­thing fin­ished.

My guess: Not often.

It happens fast for some people and slow for others, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated.

Fast is better. Though clearly the exception.

Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

Let’s just say that for most of us this is the least of our worries.

Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don’t feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.

So, is this true or not?

4357

[b]so sad today

when i’m about to die remind me how much i don’t like everything[/b]

Yep, that’ll do it.

text me back: the musical

Off-off-off Broadway as it were.

i can’t understand people who don’t feel like they are dying every single day

Or that they even exist at all.

911 what’s your emergency?
i exist

Someone try that and get back to us.

i only go to public places to not talk to anyone

You know, if they’ll play along.

i miss the illusion of you

Also, the illusion of me.

4358

[b]Orson Scott Card

Ender Wiggin isn’t a killer. He just wins—thoroughly.[/b]

Of course his life is entirely…scripted?

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

Nothing apparently that I’ve ever said. Though they were the right words.

I also remembered that you were beautiful.
Memory does play tricks on us.
No. Your face is the same, but I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore.

Obviously open to interpretation.

I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.

Though I am certainly willing to take that chance.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

Nope, I think I have spoken them all. And then some.

Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.

Some will then take this all the way to the grave.

4359

[b]Richard Yates

The hell with this aching, suffering, callow, half-assed delusion that he was in “love” with her. The hell with “love” anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “what took you so long?”

He took each fact as it came and let it slip painlessly into the back of his mind, thinking, Okay, okay, I’ll think about that one later; and that one; and that one; so that the alert, front part of his mind could remain free enough to keep him in command of the situation.

Ah, the objectivist mind at work.

That’s how we both got committed to this enormous delusion—because that’s what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion—this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families.

You think that it can never happen to you. Even long after it already did.

A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

Not much stops them, right?

He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. Then, ashamed of himself, he bent over and carefully set his drink on the grass, go out his handkerchief and blew his nose. The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs, or you started telling about the Wheelers with a sad, sentimental smile and saying Frank was courageous, and then what the hell did you have?

You have this: Games people play.

The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality – and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy and pretend it never happened.

Not only that but practice makes perfect. Of course that was back in the Fifties.

4360

[b]Existential Comics:

Ontology solved:
What exists? Everything.
What doesn’t exist? Everything else.[/b]

And then some.

This thing that didn’t exist a few weeks ago isn’t quite as good as it should be, and it’s ruining my goddamn life.

Not only that but it could be damn near anything.

The important thing to remember about your opinions is that you are pretty much the only one who cares what they are.

In other words, especially here.

Dostoevsky is important to read, because otherwise you might never figure out the complex motivations behind the murders you’ve committed.

Unless of course you just did it for the money.

Why is philosophy important?
I don’t know, maybe because we should actually think about what the fuck we are doing from time to time.

He thought: Know your limits though.
Not to mention theirs.

Men who think feminism is a struggle for power and not a struggle for justice do so because they can’t imagine struggling for anything else.

Come on, in this day and age: Is there?