The funny thing about people who smugly tell everyone that “nothing matters” is that they quite obviously value their own smugness.[/b]
I know that I do.
If you can’t trust faceless corporations who exist solely to enrich the shareholders to do what’s best for society, then who can you trust?
How about their enablers in Washington?
Postmodernism is the worst. One time when I was twelve postmodernism stole my bike and then laughed at me for thinking the word “bike” picked out a concrete object in the world.
Probably not a true story.
What philosophers dreamed of accomplishing:
500 BC: understanding everything
300: understanding virtue.
1100: understanding God.
1700: understanding even a single thing.
1950: understanding just how to say something that makes sense.
2018: I don’t know, to get my article published?
Impeach Trump?
Crony capitalism is when politicians work with rich capitalists to suppress dissent among the workers. Regular capitalism is when the police just beat up the dissenters directly.
Then back and forth they go.
What is philosophy? It’s when you think about something so much that you actually end up understanding it less.
And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.[/b]
Wit. Sometimes it’s all you need.
Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
Good god, imagine thinking that way about philosophy.
Some people react physically to the magic of poetry, to the moments, that is, of authentic revelation, of the communication, the sharing, at its highest level…A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.
A good poem. That’s always the catch of course.
Our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.
No one really knows if this is true however.
I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me.
Either that or they hold me.
Youth calls to age across the tired years: What have you found, he cries, what have you sought?
What have you found, age answers through his tears, What have you sought.
Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.[/b]
Up in the clouds for example.
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.
Not unlike the circle of a full day.
…she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.
He thought: That’s what I miss the most.
Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.
Provided of course you have that option.
Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.
Provided of course they have that option.
At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.
I don’t quite grasp your meaning.
Just as I don’t quite understand what I am saying. But back to the point….[/b]
Unless of course that is the point.
I have yet to hear a single idea that was worth considering for longer than it took us to listen to it.
Seriously, why do people say such preposterous things?
…don’t ask me what good and what evil are, we knew what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an exception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter…
Trust is often problematic here. With ourselves no less than with others.
…we know that it is the search that gives meaning to any find and that one often has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near.
The search sometimes being all there is.
God will save you.
Surely you’re forgetting that God saves souls rather than bodies.
Let’s pin down the difference.
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.
It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
People in particular.
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which is at home at the moment.
One suspects that’s the whole point of it.
Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job. And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another–that is surely the basic instinct. Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.
Come on, has that ever happened to you?
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.[/b]
Still, what’s that [nowadays] next to what is going to happen.
Because in loving his darkness I found my own.
Anyone here interested in loving mine?
This man was gorgeous. I’m mentioning this because women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it.
Lots of things like that we don’t admit to. Right?
Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight.
Let alone address.
Everybody uses everybody until we’re all just a bunch of used up shit sacks waiting to go to dirt.
She means almost everybody of course.
Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies.
2028: first horse elected president
2048: first robot elected president
2088: first gelatinous mass elected president[/b]
All still an improvement on what we have now.
doktor: are you taking your pills?
me: as many as i can
In other words, over and under the counter.
your nostalgia is killing you
For some though, what else is there?
twitter 2009: skateboard
twitter 2012: bicycle
twitter 2014: automobile
twitter 2018: still a car, but heavily damaged and always on the verge of catching fire
Next up: demolition derby.
I would never belong to a conspiracy that would have me as a member
“Millions saw the apple fall but Newton was the one who asked why.” Bernard Baruch[/b]
Let’s top that.
“One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.” David Foster Wallace
Or, sure, more comforting.
“Everywhere do I percieve a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage under that name and pretext of commonwealth.” Thomas More
If only all the way to the bank.
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.” Thomas More
For our time, triple it at least.
“Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.” Anaxagoras
And how far can that be from the unknown.
“Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.” Thales
Unless of course [in today’s world] you are absolutely certain to get away with it.
You can’t be striving to please; you must be striving to get to the heart of the matter.[/b]
Whether there is one or not.
Ask the right questions if you’re going to find the right answers.
Whether there are any or not.
The people I admire most are those who struggle for everyone.
Boy, he thought, does that take me back.
The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other … but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what’s called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.
Or, as Lester put it, “Comedy is tragedy plus time!”
I’ve opened my mouth on a lot of subjects. And I thought the more prestige you get, I’d have the power to do what I like. It’s not true.
Just ask Jane Fonda.
As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.
You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That’s what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.[/b]
Either that or [as we all know here] mangle it.
Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.
Besides, we all know the fate of Richard Cory.
The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe — so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.
Not that you can’t start there.
It’s despair that so few of us care. It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world. It’s despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they’ve won a lot of money. And then do what you’ve done to me.
It’s despair that, in the end, it is all essentially meaningless.
I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.
And who hasn’t felt that? Here for example.
He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you’ve got that ability. So have thousands.
Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.[/b]
Thank god for philosophy he almost thought.
In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal.
And don’t forgot the yellow, red and brown folks.
They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A’s and the C’s tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape.
Unless of course you’re riding around in a limousine.
Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.
Next up: the wage slave.
Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.
Noted. Right?
In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More.
A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won’t even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atom, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war. [/b]
Maybe?
By now the only part of me not sweating were my eyeballs. An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel…
I think I know what he means. But, sure, maybe not.
The word that identified what we did not possess was “money,”. The other word was “votes,” so that together “money votes” was “open sesame” to the deep caverns of the American political system.
Obviously, there are more compelling ways to point this out.
Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician had to keep his lips constantly moving.
And that’s a lot of lies.
Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.
Of course that won’t always be true.
So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.
“We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.” Rene Descartes[/b]
Come on, like there are not really, really important distinctions to make.
“The World is not ruined by the wickedness of the wicked, but by the weakness of the good” Napoleon Bonaparte
By definition, right?
“I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what people ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ observe.” Albert Einstein
And then on to the very, very big and the very, very small.
“Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Clearly, for better or worse.
“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Dialectically as it were.
“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” Karl Popper
My impression is that life—a big word, I know—inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories.[/b]
An existential contraption as it were.
Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.
In other words, either one or the other. And it doesn’t get any simpler than that.
…as everybody in the Andes knows, when the devil comes to work his evil on earth he sometimes takes the shape of a limping gringo stranger.
Up here of course it’s the other way around.
Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic.
Not counting nationalism of course. Or even rooting for the home team.
A Criminal is the case of surplus of human energy directed in the wrong direction.
Not from his point of view.
In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers.
Yeah, ain’t we the lucky ones.
[and here of course the fucking Kids]
