a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Sad Socrates

Your beliefs are your problem.[/b]

Or [here]: My beliefs are your problem.

I don’t know what it’s like to be me.

More to the point [mine]: I can’t know.

It couldn’t be a better time for earth to be destroyed.

Or, sure, right after Bob Mueller drains the swamp.

I can’t wait until machines are advanced enough to be depressed.

Like they’d ever admit it.

At least everyone dies in the end.

If only as far as we know.

It’s good to have strong opinions you don’t believe in.

In other words, as long as they don’t know it.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.[/b]

We’ll need a context of course.

What’s your name, lad?
Newton. Newton Pulsifer.
Lucifer? What’s that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Darkness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your Stygian and hellish masters?
That’s Pulsifer, explained Newton. With a P. I don’t know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey.
The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed.

It should.

You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so t here wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an ‘I.’ No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points.

“I” would never go that far myself.

It is said that scattered through Despair’s domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.

Not unlike despair itself.

The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.

Including nightmares.

You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It’s that something’s going on in your head, and you can’t control it. I mean, It’s like there’s these bad worlds inside you. But it’s just you… it’s like you’re betraying yourself.

Or, sure, fulfilling yourself in the good ones.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.[/b]

A couple of ways to interpret that, right?

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.

My guess: neither here nor there.

But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Well, sure, technically.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

Let’s prove that once again.

That is another of your odd notions, said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.”

Including dasein, right?

Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

I know: At least a hundred.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Sun Tzu[/b]

Not counting Michael Cohen of course.

“The future depends on what we do in the present.” Mahatma Gandhi

Wow, who would have ever thought that?!

“Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.” Zhuangzi

With the possible exception of those that work.

“Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.” Rem Koolhaas

And not just in architecture.

“I am the punishment of God…If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” Ghengis Khan

No doubt akin to Aguirre’s wrath of God.

“Tell me where is the love in what your prophet has said? Man, it sounds to me just like a prison for the walking dead.” Jeff Buckley

Someone should have told him that, for many, that’s the whole point.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.[/b]

Isn’t sex biological?

This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a ‘pristine wilderness.’ They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.

How then does your life measure up?

It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.

One way or the other, it always seems to be maybe.

There was no going back now. There was no going forward either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill…

Anyone here able to pin this down? Substantively as it were.

People who asked questions didn’t necessary like being asked questions.

And not all of them work for the government.

Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.

If they even have one.

[b]John Dewey

The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.[/b]

Let’s run this by the military industrial complex.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

Let’s run this by the ruling class.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

If not axiomatically.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Indeed, imagine my thoughts getting around.

Forty years spent in wandering in a wilderness like that of the present is not a sad fate–unless one attempts to make himself believe that the wilderness is after all itself the promised land.

At 40, some are just getting started.

I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I’m an atheist.

At least until the day we die. Then, come on, all bets are off.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I fought the ocean and the ocean won[/b]

Imagine then fighting the whole fucking universe.

If i could afford to be a loner, i wouldn’t talk to anybody.

Unless you count posts here.

do you believe in tragic?

Oh yeah.

out on the road today, I saw a catcher in the rye sticker on a cadillac. a little voice inside my head said “phonies”

Apologies to Don Henley.

have you tried explaining yourself to yourself?

Better me than you.

a mystery that murders the reader

Let’s take this one to Creative Writing.

[b]C.G. Jung

The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.[/b]

And then one day it dawns on you: You almost certainly won’t.

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.

Yet another intrguing observation that can mean almost anything.

In the interview, he gave an example of a man who falls head over heels in love, then later in life regrets his blind choice as he finds that he has married his own anima–the unconscious idea of the feminine in his mind, rather than the woman herself.

Don’t you just hate that?

have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

God willing, he’s right.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown….

Eventually forever and ever.

Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt.

Really repressed, right Mr. Objectivist?

[b]T.S. Eliot

time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present[/b]

I don’t doubt it.

Only through time time is conquered

That and with the space to do it.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

And this guy died over 50 years ago.

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech

Wow, does that take me back.

We must learn to suffer more.

You can’t help but wonder: What prompted that?

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

Of course few of us will ever stop there.

[b]so sad today

wouldn’t say i have a death wish but i don’t have a life wish either[/b]

Unless of course she’s faking it.

hope i don’t get reincarnated

Seriously though, would you if you could?

honk if you’re sick of your own bullshit

Let’s face it, for some, there’s not a horn big enough.

i don’t care if you don’t love me just love me

Ever been this desperate yourself?

no, i can’t just accept myself as i am

On the other hand, try getting around it.

can’t tell if I’m dead

A little help here.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.[/b]

Let’s explain that. Providing of course it’s true.

She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.

Trust me: Not counting my strangeness.

And didn’t it always go like that–body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

Even fascinating from time to time.

I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don’t want that to happen to me.

On the other hand, anyone here that hasn’t happened to?

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well.

Obviously some more than others.

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.

Stumbling about blindly as it were.

[b]Kurt Cobain

We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.[/b]

On the other hand, try and stop them.

Please read my diary, look through my things and figure me out.

I suspect that no one ever did.

I feel compelled to say fuck you fuck you to those of you who have absolutely no regard for me as a person. You have raped me harder than you’ll ever know. So again I say fuck you although this phrase has totally lost its meaning. Fuck You! Fuck You!

And that’s just Courtney, he said in jest.

It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.

Plants too.

This song is dedicated to Frank Zappa, and River Phoenix, Fred Gwynne who played Herman Munster, Dixie Lee Ray, Thomas P, Tip O’Neil, and you, dumb ass, who just threw water on me.

Anyone know which song that was?

Hi, my name is Kurt Cobain, I’m homosexual, I’m a pagan, I’m a drug abuser, and I like to fuck pot-bellied pigs!

Maybe, but he still pulled the trigger. Or so they say.

[b]so sad today

it’s important to give up on everything first thing in the morning[/b]

Or, sure, pace yourself.

when you see the emptiness in everything i’ll be here for you

Probably shouldn’t count on me though.

thought about asking this guy on the street if he wanted to fuck but then didn’t

He wondered: Was it me?

help me not be myself

And what might that be?

one thing i don’t like is the way things are

My advice? Don’t underestimate that.

things i fear:
the unknown
the known

Me too, but not in that order.

[b]Tom Stoppard

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.[/b]

Ain’t that not the truth?

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

First, of course, is this true?

Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

So, can you live with that?

Uncertainty is the normal state.

But how certain can we be of that?

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Let’s cite the most obvious examples.

You can’t treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

Does anyone here still do?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.[/b]

A metaphor for something obviously.

If only there weren’t so many other people in the world, he said lugubriously.

Lugubriously indeed.

Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.

Comforting, isn’t it?

And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll’s house, a voice would start whispering: There must be more money! There must be more money! And the children would stop playing, to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard. There must be more money! There must be more money!

Cue [among other things] Trumpworld.

A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

So, how did I pull it off, he wondered.

It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

For some, the perfect relationship.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.[/b]

Human all too human indeed.

The only righteous thing on the face of the earth is death. No one has ever bribed their way out of that. The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that’s all the justice you’ll find in this world.

This either comforts you or it doesn’t.

Let time be the judge. Time is just, but only in the long term—not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.

Perhaps a bit too philosophical?

Pretty soon, I’ll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that’s left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is… I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.

On the other hand, where do people end and the pieces of paper begin?

In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing. Boundless.

Doesn’t work that way at all here, does it?

Women’s war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.

We really are doomed then.

[b]Robert Musil

An impractical man–which he not only seems to be, but really is–will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea.[/b]

Anyone else live in their own little world?

…love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.

On the other hand, there are not many strong emotions that isn’t applicable to.

In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk – all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances.

Dasein on steroids.

His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.

Let’s just say that in this world there will always be room for both.

In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really known she had: a soul.
What’s that? It is easy to define negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.

Does that clear things up for you?

Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.

You tell me.

[b]God

Retweet this and you can kill a guy.[/b]

Maybe next time.

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the last people you should trust, and I mean that both literally and alphabetically.

God being clever.

Only one species on Earth is so arrogantly alienated from its ecosystem it has to set aside a day just to reluctantly acknowledge it lives on a planet.

And it ain’t cats and dogs.

The Marvel Universe is way cooler than mine.

So, is that saying much?

The Syria strikes are a direct response to the devastating and unprecedented attack on Monday that left hundreds of Michael Cohen’s records seized.

Well, He is omniscient.

Reality was a bad idea.

Like it just dawned on Him.

[b]Herta Müller

All of that piles on you so that, sooner or later, you cannot bear it anymore. And in that situation I started to write, because there was no other ways for me to express, except through the vicious cycle of words.[/b]

Is that grim or what?

Hey, not while I’m at my devotions, not so fast, the fat man said, inside the shithouse you’re communing with God, and outside you find that all hell’s broken loose.

Is that grim or what?

We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood, it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.

It’s right around the corner now.

Nothing had anything to do with me. I was locked up inside myself and evicted from myself. I didn’t belong to them and I was missing me.

Is that right around the corner too?

Boredom is fear’s patience. Fear doesn’t want to exaggerate. Only on occasion–and fear considers this very important–does it want to know how things stand with me.

Or something like that.

The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands, everybody looked at the raised hands of the others. If someone’s own hand wasn’t as high as the others’, he would stretch his arms a little farther. People kept their hands up until their fingers grew tired and started to droop and their elbows began to feel heavy and pull downward. Everyone looked around, and since no one else’s arm was lowered, they straightened their fingers again and extended their elbows. Sweat stains showed under the arms; shirts and blouses came untucked. Necks were stretched, ears turned red, lips parted and stayed half-open. Heads kept still, while eyes slid from side to side.

Been there, done that?

[b]Jane Smiley

Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It’s all very nice to say you’re an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make sure we do what you say, think how you think, and remember you’re the boss.[/b]

Remember when Joker was an anarchist? :wink:

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.

Can things get any grimmer?

I had a burden lift off me that I hadn’t even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.

For better or worse of course.

I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have reached the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is the years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and the rest of the world have broken down, after all - after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from.

But not you, right?

I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we’d been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again.

Actually, three minutes is more than enough for some.

Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man’s table, or the child from a woman’s breast, or the wife from a man’s bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.

That just about sums it all up.