a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Liane Moriarty

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else’s tragedy—drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall—but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you.[/b]

You’d think that would go without saying.

It wasn’t logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear.

And you can take that to the mirror.

Did anyone really know their child? Your child was a little stranger, constantly changing, disappearing and reintroducing himself to you. New personality traits could appear overnight.

The post-modern child she means.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.

Not anymore, right?

There were worse things to be than sexist. For example, you could be the sort of person who pinched your fingers together while using the words “teeny weeny.”

We’ll need a context of course.

None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have, and maybe should have taken.

Though some will think about that constantly.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.[/b]

You know, if that’s your thing.

You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.

You can even call it art.

Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’
Which of us was right, boss?

Or: Which of them is wrong?

Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all is not to have one.

Mine are over there, stacked in the corner.

All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time don’t live them! D’you see?

Here of course it’s crystal clear.

You will, Judas, my brother. God will give you the strength, as much as you lack, because it is necessary—it is necessary for me to be killed and for you to betray me. We two must save the world. Help me.
Judas bowed his head. After a moment he asked, If you had to betray your master, would you do it?
Jesus reflected for a long time. Finally he said, No, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to. That is why God pitied me and gave me the easier task: to be crucified.

See how ridiculous religion can get?

[b]Jeanette Winterson

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things you must risk it.[/b]

You know, if you dare.

Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l’oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people’s psychology with my own.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] that’s all quite normal.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what’s dead. It won’t complain.

You tell me: Is that good to know?

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

And not just Nazis.

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

So, Mr. Objectivist, do you?

It’s only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself.

Unless of course it’s the other way around.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.[/b]

Actually, I thought that my own were true sentences. The publishers did not.

Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

Unless of course even he didn’t grasp it.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

That tells us just enough to imagine that we know what it means.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

In fact why did they make the sea itself so cruel? Or the land for that matter.

My big fish must be somewhere.

Probably right around the corner from your one true love.

The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals.

Tell that to the folks at PETA.

[b]Bernard Malamud

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go–if there are no doors or windows–he walks through a wall.[/b]

Of course it takes a lot of practice.

Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?

Or whether to look at all.

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

If only in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

Now more than ever for example.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

If only from the cradle to the grave.

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

On the other hand, that’s not always easy to prove.

[b]David Byrne

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they’re singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.[/b]

That explains why so many actors want to be musicians. What explains why so many musicians want to be actors?

Facts just twist the truth around.

Much as when truth just twists the fact around.

This kind of compartmentalizing—separating one’s livelihood from one’s social aspirations—is part of the reason David Koch, the hidden hand behind a lot of ultraconservatives and, reportedly, the Tea Party movement in the United States, transforms himself into a respected arts patron by funding a theater at Lincoln Center, or why at Swiss bank that helps U.S. depositors avoid paying taxes generously supports symphony halls and the ballet. It’s almost as if there are moral scales, and by tossing some loot on one side, you can balance out the precarious situation your reputation might be getting into on the other.

That’s how it works alright.

You might say that the universe plays the blues.

You might all the more when it shits on you.

It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices.

Well, it could be true.

Around 1900, according to music writer Alex Ross, classical audiences were no longer allowed to shout, eat, and chat during a performance.2 One was expected to sit immobile and listen with rapt attention. Ross hints that this was a way of keeping the hoi polloi out of the new symphony halls and opera houses.

Well, it could be true.

[b]Alan Moore

Isn’t it strange how life turns into melodrama?[/b]

More to the point, why do they let it?

I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority.

That’s what Don Trump is for. To fuck that up too.

Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice.

One genre in particular: objectivism

The real curriculum is punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony, those skills we shall require later in life. Oblique aversion therapy to cure us of our thirst for information, and condition us so that thereafter we forge an association between indolence and pleasure. We confuse rebellion with a hairstyle.

And [these days] not just in the red states.

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.

Or at least free to think that we are.

You have waged bitter and undeclared war upon the green, gutting the rain forests, mile after mile, day after day, but know this: the war has come home! It is man’s turn to embrace the scythe.

Or so they keep telling us.

[b]Existential Comics

No, the revolution will not be televised. But it will sure as hell be tweeted about.[/b]

You know, when it actually comes around.

Looking for a fun new hobby this Spring? Try agitating class consciousness among the proletariat to build a militant labor movement.

In Russia for example.

Socrates: “all I know is I know nothing.”
Protagoras: “but don’t you also know that you know you know nothing?”
Socrates: “dude fuck off.”

The very first language game.

Remember, it is actually legal to punch a nihilist in the face.

Indeed, and around here it is more or less obligatory.

I once pushed a fat man in front of a trolley in Vegas, just to watch him die.

Yes, even this is beyond good and evil.

What does it mean to be a philosopher today? Well, it means you are something like twice as wise as the average Joe. Maybe even three times.

Remember when this was actually true?

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.[/b]

Unless of course it’s even more mysterious than that.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

No, this really can happen.

Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because.

Right, like that will actually work.
Well, anyway, it didn’t work for me.

We spent our lives making livings.

Clearly, some better than others. Of course, it’s all rigged though isn’t it?

Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

That will never catch on, right?

And here I am, instead of there. I’m sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won’t be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

And this is all before the part about falling over into the abyss that is oblivion.

[b]Haruki Murakami

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.[/b]

Still does.

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

We’ll need to know more, of course.

A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn’t find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to this world - this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me.

You either get this or you don’t. Pain, it turns out, can be tricky as hell.

I’ve had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That’s all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time.

Gay or straight as it were.

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

Enough said?

Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone’s soul being blown to the far side of the world.

Nowadays it’s probably a drone.

[b]John Locke

Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused.[/b]

Unless of course they’re a philosopher. Like we are, right?

No peace and security among mankind—let alone common friendship—can ever exist as long as people think that governments get their authority from God and that religion is to be propagated by force of arms.

Now we know it is all about the money.

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.

So, has that finally been settled? For example, once and for all?

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

Especially mine, right? And, believe it or not, not just here.

There are a thousand ways to Wealth, but only one way to Heaven.

Let’s see if Don Trump can drain that swamp.

Personal Identity depends on Consciousness not on Substance.

I’d say “bullshit!” but what if it is actually true?

[b]Thornton Wilder

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.[/b]

You know, If they deserve it.

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

Analogy: you’re the cliffs, dasein’s the tide.

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

Yes, yes, I once actually believed that too.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.

Hell, there must be at least one, right?

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

Let’s all decide what that means.

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

How deep [or shallow] is this?

[b]Robert Penn Warren

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.[/b]

I can go along with that.

For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.

Down here of course God being the least of it.

…by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it’s too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

I know, I know: Not you.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.

Not only that, but, down there, they are closer to God.

For whatever you live is life.

After all, what else could it be?

If you want him to do it, you’ve got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

Of course that works the same for us too.

[b]Karl Popper

A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.[/b]

Yeah, they’re still around.

We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

Unless of course might really does make right.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

So, scientifically, does God exist or not?

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

Uh, oh…that can’t be good.
Right?

There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. … It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.

That’s the part here where the “retard” becomes an “asshole”.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory but progress.

In other words, when they finally agree with us. If not the other way around.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I am going to curl up with a toaster in a hot bath.[/b]

Who here would like to plug it in?

doktor: when did you quit taking drugs?
me: what time is it?

Doktor: when will you start taking them again?

There are two kinds of people in the world. I don’t know who they are.

Or three kinds if you count those who don’t care.

I’m in an open relationship with myself.

And even that’s not working.

cop: do you know how fast you were going?
me: man is condemned to be free
cop: not you, pal

Chance are [being a cop] he never read Being and Nothingness. Not from cover to cover.

All I’m saying is if it all goes south, I will eat human flesh.

In other words, not just pussy.

[b]Charles Darwin

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “uh, oh”.

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

Either that or just shrug and move on.

Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Well, he had to call it something, right?

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind…We behold the face of nature bright with gladness…We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.

It’s a fucking butcher shop, isn’t it?
I know, let’s ask God.

But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.

Maybe, but nowadays we give it a fright or two.

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

For example, our fair result.

[b]P.G. Wodehouse

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.[/b]

You know, like the rest of us. Only better.

It’s a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don’t find it. If you don’t give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.

In other words, funny as in not funny at all.

Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.

Let’s make that the rule here too.

You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.

Let alone wear them.

I mean, if you’re asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it’s absurd to tack a ‘sir’ on to every sentence. The two things don’t go together.

Unless, of course, you’re just being ironic.

…it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that’s in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking.

Unless perhaps it’s God.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

The world is simple. We wouldn’t understand.[/b]

Obviously: It can’t get much simpler than that.

There’s nothing darker than the light at the end of the tunnel.

And coming right at you.

Caution! Future ahead.

Great, just what we need: Yet another reference to Trump.

You can have it and miss it too.

Subconsciously say.

Silence has its own grammar.

Unspeakably as it were.

In the beginning there was Beauty. Then we tried to define it.

Hey, don’t look at me.

[b]Alexandre Dumas

Order is the key to all problems.[/b]

In other words, that’s what they all say. And that’s the problem.

The wretched and the miserable should turn to their Savior first, yet they do not hope in Him until all other hope is exhausted.

That seems to be how it all too often works alright.

It is the infirmity of our nature always to believe ourselves much more unhappy than those who groan by our sides!

I know: In your case it’s actually true.

Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit.

On the other hand, only a fool wouldn’t be suspicious of pure love.

If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.

So, how am I doing?

If you wish to discover the guilty person, first find out to whom the crime might be useful.

You know, if you’re a pragmatist.

[b]Shirley Jackson

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.[/b]

They do always say that honesty is the best policy.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality…

On the other hand, reality always has been, always is and always will be just what it it. Absolutely or not.

…you’d think my own face would know me…

On the other hand, he thought, why would it want to?

Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs, and when Brad said, What starts to happen? she said hysterically, People starting to come apart.

Margaret has seen too many movies.

Fear and guilt are sisters…

If not identical twins.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

Neurotically as it were. Or, in any event, as it certainly can be.