a thread for mundane ironists

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4481

[b]Jean Rhys

A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.[/b]

Either that or the place you turn into one.

My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don’t, streets that are friendly, streets that aren’t, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don’t, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won’t, and so on.

The part where there is rhyme and reason, the part where there is not.

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

If she’s a trickle what’s that make me? Much less you.

If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.

Obviously: Easier said than done.

Justice. I’ve heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.

Try writing it in capital letters. You know, after you define it.

And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I’d been afraid for a long time. There’s fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.

Let’s call it dread now.

4482

[b]Edward Albee

You’re alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it?[/b]

Or: what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you had lived it?
[think about it]

What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.

So, what are implications of that…here?

I write to find out what I’m talking about.

Unless of course that doesn’t work.

Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

For example…?

Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference.
No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Amen.

Actually, we carry on. Period.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.

Nope, none here.

4483

[b]Existential Comics

Remember, if you read widely enough you will eventually find someone who defends whatever position you already wanted to believe anyway.[/b]

Right, like that will ever happen to me.

Remember: the person who will most readily believe your lies will always be yourself.

Nope, even I don’t believe them. Well, most times.

“Self made millionaire” is a funny term, because it almost always means someone whose fortune was entirely made from their employees’ labor.

The class strugle. It’s back!
On Twitter.

Doctor: “don’t drink alcohol in excess with this medication.”
Wittgenstein: “yeah there’s actually no way to know what ‘excess’ means here.”

Indeed, and imagine him discussing “reasonable doubt” with a lawyer.

The invisible hand of the market will always come to the right decision. Unless it harms the rich, then the government had better intervene.

The real welfare state.

Centrist in 1860: we need a heathy mix of slavery and freedom.

I’m sure they are still around.

4484

[b]William Gibson

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy.[/b]

Unlike, for example, philosophy.

We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. … We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.

One of those, “Jesus, now that you think about it…”, observations.
Right?

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Instead, they pay us to be human. As little as possible for example.

The Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.

In other words, it fits right in.

The present tense made him nervous.

But no more so than the past and the future.

Things aren’t different. Things are things.

Right, like they can’t be both.

4485

[b]Penelope Lively

…crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.[/b]

And [for some] almost none of it has to be true.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.

Maybe, but that doesn’t make some sound any less like assholes.

History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.

In other words, not unlike the present and the future.

My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.

Worse: your understanding of the present.

I’ve grown old with this century; there’s not much left of either of us.

For most of you though, that will be this century.

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

Still, it sure as shit can be.

4486

[b]Nein

You’ve reached my bottle. Please leave a message.[/b]

Then launch it in the general direction of oblivion.

Dangerous thinkers. Perfect for when you’re in danger of thinking. Then reconsider.

Got a slew of them here, don’t we? :wink:

A nihilist walks into a bar code…

…and he actually scans!

Face it: your weekend was ruined years ago.

About nine months before you were born.

In other news: time and space have announced their divorce.

So, would that drive Brangelina off the front page?

Friends, it’s time to put politics aside. Move on to aesthetics. And really start fighting.

Okay, is Trump more or less beautiful than Clinton?

4487

[b]Elizabeth Kolbert

Other calculations of his show that to keep pace with the present rate of temperature change, plants and animals would have to migrate poleward by thirty feet a day, and that a molecule of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels will, in the course of its lifetime in the atmosphere, trap a hundred thousand times more heat.[/b]

Of course here there are always going to be the calculations of others.

…given a shave and a new suit, the pair wrote, a Neanderthal probably would attract no more attention on a New York City subway “than some of its other denizens.

Come on, that says more about us than him.

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.

I know: The background rate? This: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backgroun … ction_rate

…how to perform an ultrasound with one arm up a rhino’s rectum.

Never see that on NatGeo Wild.

…the center of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity, there’s an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred million years ago. According to the plaque, “Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between earth and extraterrestrial objects,” were responsible for these events. It goes on to observe: “Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.”

Unless perhaps that’s the good news.

…within the next fifty years or so all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.

It’s always 50 to a 100 years in the future. And, in this “me, myself and I” world, that may as well be eternity.

4488

[b]Paul Bowles

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present.[/b]

Hmm. As though a continuation of the present might not be more terrifying still.

It made her sad to realise that in spite of their so often having the same reactions, the same feelings, they never would reach the same conclusions, because their respective aims in life were almost diametrically opposed.

On the other hand, sadness isn’t the only option.

It was one of the charms of the International Zone that you could get anything you wanted if you paid for it. Do anything, too, for that matter; there were no incorruptibles. It was only a question of price.

Remember the Green Zone? Only less heavily fortified.

What a wonderful thing to be an American! he said impetuously.
Yes, said Dyar automatically, never having given much thought to what it would be like not to be an American. It seemed somehow the natural thing to be.

Or, to paraphrase John Lennon, “keep them doped with religion and sex and TV and nationalism”.

You know, everyone here’s got some little peccadillo he’s hoping to hide.

In other words, to say the least. Only not just here.

You can’t discipline the whole country.
Still, Moss said dreamily, that’s what must be done before they can ever accomplish anything.

Here in America of course you know you are disciplined when you go begging for more.
So, don’t forget to vote!

4489

[b]John Milton

All is not lost, the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.[/b]

You know, if you can get away with it.

Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind.

Especially now.

Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, desires, and fears, is more a king.

You, right?

For so I created them free and free they must remain.

Well, not that they really have any choice of course.

And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Me? Just dump my body in the woods somewhere.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

How about that, Lord?

4490

[b]Marquis de Sade

My vengeance needs blood.[/b]

That and getting away with it.

Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think…

Even he has to remind himself of this.

It has been estimated that more than 50 million individuals have lost their lives to wars and religious massacres. Is there even one among them worth the blood of a single bird?

What’s the estimate today?

Now we come to the crux of my philosophy: if the taking of pleasure is enhanced by the criminal character of the circumstances – if, indeed, the pleasure taken is directly proportionate to the severity of the crime involved – then is it not criminality itself which is pleasurable, and the seemingly pleasure-producing act nothing more than the instrument of its realization?

Let’s solve this.

Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me.

Admit it: Even the least cynical among us stumble into this from time to time.

Nothing quite encourages as does one’s first unpunished crime.

I’ll share mine if you’ll share yours.

4491

[b]Haruki Murakami

Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You’re a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it’s directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.[/b]

Obviously: You don’t have to be a farmer.

Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.

Any that you would like to share?

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don’t know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

The good news: Only from the cradle to the grave. Or, sure, the bad news.

To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

No doubt about it: That’s a good way to put it.

The sad truth is that certain types of things can’t go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can’t go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that’s how it will stay forever.

Let’s go back and change that.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

In other words, if you do it right.

4492

[b]so sad today

dream date is u come over, we fuck well, u leave, i don’t know your name, you text me wonderful things, i still don’t know your name, we die[/b]

Come on, what are the odds?

no, i can’t just ‘do things for fun’

Not that [from time to time] I don’t want to.

cause of death: got out of bed

You know, if you’re lucky.

come over and give up on me

Or, sure, do it virtually.

can’t decide if i’ve made enough mistakes yet to go to bed

Have you reached a 100?

2 seconds: amount of time it takes me to get obsessed
never: amount of time it takes me to get over it

Anyone: Is there a pill for that?

4493

[b]Richard Ford

But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed.[/b]

Much like, say, you and I.

My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything—a marriage, a conversation, a government—as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.

Much like, say, you and I.

In their faces I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

Truth be told I never even came close.

When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again—which is a loss. But to shield yourself—as I didn’t do—seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

Either way, in other words, you can’t win. Though clearly some do.

Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.

Has that happened to you yet? Oh, and what are the odds that it won’t?

. . . no matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you’re willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from—anything at all can follow anything at all.

Not really true of course but [more often than not] it’s no consolation.

4494

[b]Alan Moore

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.[/b]

Or philosophy, if you’re not. Right, Kids?

Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea…and ideas are bulletproof.

One thing though: Their ideas too.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

One thing though: Their truth too.

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor…I am Pagliacci.”

I know: The doc should send him here. Right, Kids?

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

True. Just not beyond a reasonable doubt.

Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.

Not excluding the illusion of happiness of course.

4495

[b]Orson Scott Card

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.[/b]

Perhaps literally but not in reality.
[no, really, think about it]

Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.

The part that brings about, among other things, consequences.

I taught you everything you know. But I didn’t teach you everything I know.

And that’s obviously the good news or the bad news.

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

Defined? That’s the least of it.

…the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything, to have that seed growing. It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.

Until, of course, he began to doubt that too.

You killed more people than anybody in history.
Be the best at whatever you do, that’s what my mother always told me.

No doubt: Before he killed her too.

4496

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Songs are as sad as the listener.[/b]

There are exceptions however: youtu.be/sjWMtQcNJXI

This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

Let’s just say it can get complicated. Not unlike hate.

It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.

Youth for example.

I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

And, so far, that’s worked fine. You know, with people.

My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.

On the other hand, it is also the story of everyone that you didn’t meet. The part most of us leave out.

Do you think I’m wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple.
No, he said.
Why?
Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it’s only noon. You couldn’t be something that hundreds of others are.

Now that is clever.

4497

[b]Ken Kesey

What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.[/b]

The tricky part: How long?

But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

One more thing we gotta balance.

I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.

And that’s almost always beyond good and evil.

I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wonder if I can ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn’t me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

Didn’t make it to the film though, did it? But that’s about what you figured.

What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

Not unlike the chronics here. He said in jest.

But the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that’s the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn’t anybody laughing. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

Well, what exactly was there to laugh about?

4498

[b]Existential Comics

The most important thing to learn is to think for yourself.
But also that just because an idea is yours, that doesn’t make it not stupid.[/b]

You know, just in case you forgot that part.

How can we live the best?
Proust: create great art
Aristotle: be virtuous
Kierkegaard: find genuine faith
Schopenhauer: try not to be born

Next up: Emil Cioran

But is there an ideal platonic form of nominalism??

And, if so, is it still around?

I thought I came up with a clever new Gettier case, and was justified for thinking so, but it turned out to just be a sort of coincidence…

This thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

Yes, life is suffering. But there are moments of joy. Like when there’s two people on a really awkward first date near you at a restaurant.

I’ve been there. In other words, at both ends.

In America, we hold freedom of religion above all else. Unless you are the wrong religion, of course, and then maybe we should kick you out.

Maybe?!

4499

[b]David Wong

To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.[/b]

Of course here in America hardly a day goes by without a new rendition of that.

You take risks; you get hurt. And you put your head down and plow forward anyway and if you die, you die. That’s the game. But don’t tell me you’re not a hero. You walk away, you’re choosing to walk away. Whatever bad things happen as a result, you’re choosing to let them happen. You can lie to yourself, say that you never had a choice, that you weren’t cut out for this. But deep down you’ll know. You’ll know that humans aren’t cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, like a rusty knife. Because otherwise, here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to die and you’re going to stand at the gates of judgement and you’re going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, ‘I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning’.

Really, what if this is actually true?

No. He says when you’re dealing with any kids of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they’re real, then they have minds. They know your name. So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he’s being read about and that you’re somebody he may have to deal with. And I’m thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that.
What ‘I’ did? What about us? We were both there.
Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.

Nope. No way. You can’t fool them.

Nobody involved in a conflict thinks they’re the villain.

Not counting those who take pride in it.

And, well, that’s my story, I said. I’m sorry that it’s so, you know, retarded.

No problem. And welcome to the forum.

Amy hated—hated—the way the grown-ups her parents had surrounded themselves with were so quick to offer prayers and so low to actually do anything. Old women who barely left the house for anything but bingo and congratulated themselves on never drinking alcohol or saying dirty words, thinking God created humans to stay home and watch televangelists and just run out the clock until the day they die. Well, Amy figured you don’t need more than five minutes on this planet to figure out that one thing we know about God—maybe the only thing—is that he favors those who act.

But only the winners of course.

4500

[b]Jean Rhys

Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest is a lie.[/b]

But only if you believe it.

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn’t.

Trump v. Clinton for example.

Every word I say has chains round its ankles.

We put them there ourselves.

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy—even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.

Dimly. That’s how it starts.

…dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.

And thus the expression, “Dream on!”

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

Of course we sympathize.