a thread for mundane ironists

[b]José Saramago

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.[/b]

Sure, you can say almost anything at all about time.

That we’re going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That’s why, in some ways, it’s as if we were born dead.

From the moment we are born? Probably not.

It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking, afterwards, it might be too late.

But [one hopes] only as a last resort.

…there is nothing in this world that belongs to us in an absolute sense…

Let’s think of one.

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

We’ll need a context of course.

You have no idea what it is like to watch two blind people fighting.

To the best of my knowledge, not even in the movies.

[b]Existential Comics

If you boil a frog slowly enough, you won’t even realize that you are doing something cruel and inhumane.[/b]

Of course there’s only one way to find out…

The thing I legitimately don’t get about evolution is that we find like every other animal baby cuter than human babies.
Baby cat? Cuter.
Baby elephant? Cuter.
Baby kangaroo? Cuter.
Baby bear? Cuter.
Baby raccoon? Cuter. Not even close.
Explain this, science man. You can’t.

Not only that but [as we all know] some human babies are downright ugly.

The most iconic line in each medium:
Literature: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Plays: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
Movies: “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Video games: “You have died of dysentery.”

Explanation please.

What I love about America is that there are like 400 different kinds of salsa in the grocery store isle, and they are all shit.

Actually, it’s probably closer to just 200 different kinds.

zombies are just vampires from the peasant caste

And not just in India.

The sciences are important because we need the ability to describe how things are. The humanities are important because we need the ability to imagine how things might be.

Even ought to be.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build![/b]

Or, here, one supposes, I don’t post in order to have readers. I have readers in order to post!

Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Until you get to his nipples.

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought–while his hand moved rapidly–what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

Hell, some all but live in a world of them.

It‘s so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I’ll ever understand.

Perhaps, but, for her kind, it always comes down to my judgment or you’re a fucking idiot.

Roark was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went.

Her obsession with “looks”. In order to be an objectivist one must look like one.

I hate incompetence. I think it’s probably the only thing I do hate.

And luckily for her [in loving to hate it] it’s everywhere.

[b]Herta Müller

Who can take a single step with his head?[/b]

Among other things, how profound is this?

Better to be at home in room and garden with ugly people than belong to strangers.

Especially ugly strangers.

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.

Let’s decide: Genes more or less than memes?

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.

Obviously: you commit suicide.

And I’m different without you. You’re the only one who thinks you’re never different.

Well, the only one besides me.

I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, trees, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians I see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said.

Hey, whatever works, right?

[b]Sad Socrates

Every day I care less and less that you’re dying.[/b]

And, no doubt, you about me.

There’s always another generation to fool.

Still, Trump’s clinched a spot all his own here.

Might fuck myself later.

Might let you.

I am what you are trying to be.

Or, with me, not to be.

Feels like it’s time to die again.

Another day in other words.

I was the low point of my day.

Though now it’s you.

[b]Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.[/b]

Long, long ago maybe.

The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours.

Provided of course that this is where they stop.

There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally.

On the other hand, some of us are running out of time.

It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up – that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

For those with little or no options, however, we’ll file this one under, “blah, blah, blah”.

We think sometimes we’re only drawn to the good, but we’re actually drawn to the authentic.

My guess: that includes the bad.

I’ve told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

Yes, people like this really do exist.
Fortunately, I guess.

[b]Lillian Hellman

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don’t start the earthquakes and don’t stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.[/b]

Of course no one believes that now.

You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.

On the other hand, you will have all of eternity to do nothing at all.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

I guess that includes young philosophers.

How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I’ve always thought.

And not just in the vicinity of the IRS.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge’s chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

A baby carriage sure.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

And, for some of us, nothing we read.

[b]Existential Comics

How to cure an existential crisis:

1. Reevaluate your reason to live.
2. Commit yourself fully to an ideal.
3. Quit your job and live the life of your dreams.
4. Eat a sandwich, your blood sugar is probably just low.[/b]

My guess: It’s almost never number 4.

[b]Banksy is a great artist for people who:

1. think the South Park guys are great intellectuals.
2. can’t name a single other artist.[/b]

Let’s decide if this is true.

That phrase “there is more than one way to skin a cat” is weird as hell. Where did it come from? At what point in human history were people skinning so many cats that everyone had multiple good techniques?

What’s the lowdown here?

We think we have an open society because we can criticize our government, but the company we work for has far more impact on our lives, and if you criticize them publicly they will fire you. The private sphere is still run like a dictatorship, by thousands of petty tyrants.

I think they call this capitalism.

Beauty is:
Aristotle: order, symmetry, and definiteness.
Burke: stimulation of pleasure in the senses.
Schopenhauer: contemplation of the virtues of an object’s form.
Camus: what I see when I look in the mirror.

Well, the chicks did dig him.

You don’t become more conservative as you get older, you become more conservative when you inherit your parents’ property.

Well, you would have more to conserve.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.[/b]

And then, for some of us, not unlike our walks into the future.

in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t.

And [now] getting more like that all the time.

The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don’t understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars—many of which this country has had a hand in.

Yet another futile attempt to bring reality into the discussion.

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.

Among others, the folks on Wall Street see to that.

His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.

History is what the rich and powerful [winners or losers] say it is. At least that’s my guess.

[b]Mario Vargas Llosa

One can’t fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.[/b]

Maybe, but, so far, I’m still holding my own. Though plenty here have gone down for the count.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Or, for some here no doubt, rather bluntly.

It’s easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it.

Especially around assholes.

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It’s something that gives me what real life can’t give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

Obviously: If only in your head.

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella.

Like the shit even notices.

The secret to happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to separate sex from love. And, if possible, eliminating romantic love from your life, which is the love that makes you suffer. That way, I assure you, you live with greater tranquility and enjoy things more.

Now all you have to do is get your lovers to go along.

[b]Dave Eggers

…my feeling is that if you’re not self-obsessed you’re probably boring.[/b]

And what a better world that might be.

First of all, I know it’s all people like you. And that’s what’s so scary. Individually you don’t know what you’re doing collectively.

Pick one:
1] liberals seen by conservatives
2] conservatives seen by liberals

You see pictures of Buddha and he’s sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.

Or Americans to sing The Star Spankled Banner.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives it through the back of the garage.

I think I get that.

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me.

This probably explains Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr.

Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person’s faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? … When a crime is committed by a black man, it’s mentioned in the first breath: ‘An African American man was arrested today…’ But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he’s of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned.

Simple enough for you?

[b]Philip Larkin

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.[/b]

Not counting mine of course.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn’t true!

Like anyone could ever possibly know this. Not that it isn’t true though.

Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.

Sure, this sounds about not wrong.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

I sure fucked that up.

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Hell, they may not even exist at all.

I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation.

Right, like the politicians will ever notice.

[b]so sad today

i miss when empathy wasn’t a corporate marketing ploy[/b]

Of course not much isn’t a corporate marketing ploy these days.

taking my mental illness out for dinner

His treat.

Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Fuck fuck.
Fuck.

Though not necessarily in that order.

it’s important to hate everything

Or, short of that, to not love anything.

life is what happens when i’m avoiding life

This will either dawn on you or it won’t.

we both knew i wasn’t enough

Though still twice as much as you are.

[b]David Hockney

All art is contemporary, if it’s alive, and if it’s not alive, what’s the point of it?[/b]

Yep, sounds like something an artist would say.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be ‘read’ by anybody. If this hadn’t been so, the Christian message wouldn’t have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

Let’s file this one under, “I was just about to ask you what it means.”

Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, ‘Things don’t look like that!’

They still don’t.

In one gallery they actually had a notice which said, ‘No Sketching.’ How obnoxious! I said, How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?

Indeed, here’s another complaint about that: theguardian.com/artanddesig … -draconian

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

On the other hand: thinking may or may not make you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your brain aches.

The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons.

You know, in a perfect world.

[b]William F. Buckley Jr.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.[/b]

A moral slob always being “one of them”.

I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

Obviously: What does he believe now?

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so.

The liberal intellectual cliques for example.

For people who like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing they like.

It’s hard to believe, I know.

What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing—for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.

Let’s run this by Phyllo.

Human progress is achieved by taking exact measurements.

Otherwise known as political prejudices.

[b]David Sedaris

Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.[/b]

Anyone ever seen one do that down there?

Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison.

Good to know if you’re college bound.

I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!”

Actually, I never noticed that myself.

This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

Let’s just say you’ll know it when you see it.

In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, ‘Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl’.

Imagine then two Germans discoursing on Dasein.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Words are loaded pistols.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Or, occasionally, mail-bombs.

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.” Robert Louis Stevenson

Let’s keep it that way.

“No human thing is of serious importance.” Plato

At least so far.

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

Starting now, okay?

“A problem well put is half solved.” John Dewey

Except for this one: How ought one to live?

“Nothing in nature is by chance. Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.” Baruch Spinoza

You know where this might take us, right?

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

Unhappiness was my god.[/b]

We all end up worshipping something, right?

I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It’s really not my fault.

Let’s just say that, fortunately, I never even came close.

My wisdom is as spurned as chaos.

I hear that!

I could never throw Love out of the window.

I just show it the door.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

Trust me, he thought: It ends that way too. But at least it does end.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Unless of course it misses you completely.

[b]so sad today

that which does not kill you but makes you sleep all day[/b]

You know, in a perfect world.

i think you’ve mistaken my low self-esteem for kindness

Again in other words.

want to touch my anxiety?

Oh yeah!

i never know what the hell anyone is talking about

Same here. Why? Just lucky I guess.

feeling hopeless dot gov

Let’s create the equivalent of that here.

come over and give up on me

Or, sure, vice versa.

[b]Barbara W. Tuchman

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.[/b]

And how much wider can it get here, right?

Books are humanity in print.

Not to be confused with Humanity in print.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight.

In the midst of peace too.

When it comes to leaders we have, if anything, a superabundance—hundreds of Pied Pipers…ready and anxious to lead the population. They are scurrying around, collecting consensus, gathering as wide an acceptance as possible. But what they are not doing, very notably, is standing still and saying, ’ This is what I believe. This I will do and that I will not do. This is my code of behavior and that is outside it. This is excellent and that is trash.

On the other hand, sometimes [with some leaders] that can actually be a good thing.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Of course the printing press was invented in the 15th century.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

And lots of other terrible things since, right?