a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]so sad today

it’s going to get worse before it gets worse[/b]

That’s still better than I thought.

I love your opinion about bullshit

Almost as much as you love mine.

me: fuck consumerism
me: i need so much new shit

Nowadays of course that’s not even a contradiction in terms.

no, i can’t just “get off the internet”

Or [for some]: no, I can’t just “stop doing heroin”.

a panic attack inside a panic attack

And then that all the way down.

masturbating and crying and eating

Though occasionally she’ll change the order.

[b]Stieg Larsson

What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.[/b]

Of course I never even came close then.

Everyone has secrets. It’s just a matter of finding out what they are.

That and when to leave them alone.

She went around with the attitude that she would rather be beaten to death than take any shit.

You know, if that’s an option for you.

I’ve had many enemies over the years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never engage in a fight you’re sure to lose. On the other hand, never let anyone who has insulted you get away with it. Bide your time and strike back when you’re in a position of strength—even if you no longer need to strike back.

Of course not all of us are Lizbeths.

Armageddon was yesterday, today we have a serious problem.

In other words, it’s personal.

Normally seven minutes of another person’s company was enough to give her a headache so she set things up to live as a recluse. She was perfectly content as long as people left her in peace. Unfortunately society was not very smart or understanding.

And, more to the point, they far, far, far outnumber you.

[b]Stephen Fry

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There’s none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.[/b]

In other words, in a world of words, no mud.

Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn’t. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?

Actually, this had never once occured to me.

When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russell.’
Wow! I said, duly impressed.
No, No, said Cooke, It goes further than that. Bertrand Russell knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russell’s aunt danced with Napoleon. That’s how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that.

I once shook the hand of Nancy Kulp.

You can’t just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

Hint: It rhymes with “mysterious ways”.

It was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life’s most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

I suspect we all have our own rendition of this.

Anger fed him and clothed him and he owed it much.

Either anger or rage.

[b]Carson McCullers

Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he is watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for second time in the soul of the living.[/b]

Pick one:
1] Yes
2] No
3] Maybe
4] All of the above

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

But I do know.
I think.

He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.

My kind of nut.

Nothing had really changed…The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

In that case, nothing really had changed.

The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

Still, some earned it more than others. Or so it seemed to me.

A person can’t pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be.

True, but see if that stops most from trying.

[b]Liane Moriarty

It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?[/b]

Trust me: Don’t fuck this up.

…women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges.

Alhough, admittedly, it doesn’t often lead to, you know, murder.

She was busy thinking about the concept of forgiveness. It was such a lovely, generous idea when it wasn’t linked to something awful that needed forgiving.

Concepts. And, indeed, up in the clouds you gotta love them.

First kisses didn’t necessarily require darkness and alcohol, they could happen in the open air, with the sun warm on your face and everything around you honest and real and true.

First fucks too.

She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

Sounds like an “essentially absurd and meaningless world” to me. Either that or God has a lot of explaining to do.

How strange it all was. Wouldn’t it be a lot less messy if everyone just stayed with the people they married in the first place?

Either that or all the messier still.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.” Diogenes[/b]

That was then, but this is now.

“Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom.” Octavio Paz

That was then, but this is now.

“It is only thanks to God that I’m an atheist” Gianni Vattimo

Well, one of them.

“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Right, like it can’t be both.

“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

The man was a fucking genius!

“The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

And [one suspects] not just philosophically.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the longer the tether of our slavery?[/b]

The tethered mind. But isn’t that more or less the whole point, Mr. Objectivist?

When everyone drowns and I’m the only one to escape, God is protecting me. When everyone else is saved and I’m the only one to drown, God is protecting me then too.

Yep, that sounds like God alright.

When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream? When, in my rags—without desires—shall I retire contented into the mountains? When, seeing that my body is merely sickness and crime, age and death, shall I—free, fearless, and blissful—retire to the forest? When? When, oh when?

My guess: When it actually becomes an option.

What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.

Well, and shit of course.

I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else! I say: cross, death, kingdom of heaven, God…and what do you understand? Each of you attaches his own suffering, interests and desires to each of these sacred words, and my words disappear, my soul is lost.

Yes, yes I agree: I might well have said that myself.

Let people be, boss; don’t open their eyes. And supposing you did, what’d they see? Their misery! Leave their eyes closed, boss, and let them go on dreaming!

Me? Not a chance.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there’s no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true.[/b]

Of course not all miseries are created equal.

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I cannot even imagine it. For better or worse as it were.

I realized something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Right?

We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

And that’s before we get to the actual context.

I return to problems i can’t solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can’t be solved.

Out of habit if nothing else.

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.
What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down? I said.
Alaska frowned. Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.

I know: Let’s melt them all down into plowshares.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.” Ludwig Wittgenstein[/b]

And, if you know what’s good for you, it will be your complete certainty too. Right, Mr. Objectiivist?

“The world is full of abandoned meanings.” Don DeLillo

In the thousands now at least.

“There is no perfection, only life.” Milán Kundera.

Including death of course.

“Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it hasn’t got one; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.” Pier Paolo Pasolini

“I” in other words.

“The revolution is now just a sentiment.” Pier Paolo Pasolini

…and a mawkish sentiment for some.

“In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.” Gianni Versace

And, nowadays, that can be practically anything.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.[/b]

Well, to the best of my knowledge, I have borrowed but never begged.
So far.

Remember everything is right until it’s wrong. You’ll know when it’s wrong.

On the other hand, it might not even occur to you.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

Yes, I can. But that’s not really the question is it?

You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it. Doesn’t it sound lovely beyond belief?

Yes. And all the more so if it were actually true.

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

The thing that I was born for hasn’t even been invented yet. Or discovered.

I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.

Not that we can actually tell them apart of course.

[b]Bernard Malamud

If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.[/b]

Let’s just say that, unlike most here, I’m still working on it.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

True, if you count women too.

When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.

Either that or, for some, hurting others.

Would you say you have a “philosophy” of your own? If so what is it?
If I have it’s all skin and bones…If I have any philosophy…it’s that life could be better than it is.

Let’s file this one under, “don’t get me started”.

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

And then it’s off again to the voting booth.

Nobody lived in Eden anymore.

Especially not literally.

[b]David Byrne

Presuming that there is such a thing as “progress” when it comes to music, and that music is “better” now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn’t "improve.”[/b]

This may even possibly be true.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

Technically as it were.

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed.

Uh, no shit?

There is water at the bottom of the ocean.

He wrote a song about it.

In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn’t take away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.

If not downright devastating.

Psychology, the talking cure, linguistics, and semantics - they’re all like dogs poking around and sniffing their own vomit. There might be some gems in there, you never know. For certain you will at the very least know what you had for lunch. And you can ascertain what not to eat again.

How far can that be from Scientology?

[b]Alan Moore

I found it very difficult to feel easy around the guy, even once I’d got used to the shock of his presence. It’s a strange feeling…the first time you meet him your brain wants to scream, blow a fuse and shut itself down immediately, refusing to accept that he exists. This lasts for a couple of minutes, at which time he’s still there and hasn’t gone away, and in the end you just accept him because he’s standing there and talking to you and after a while it almost seems normal. Almost.[/b]

That was once said about me. Or, rather, it must have been.

It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you’ve got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch.

In other words, fuck those celebrities turned corporate shills. Well, at least I think that’s where’s he headed.

I don’t consider myself as a bad person, on the whole I consider myself a good person, I’m good to my parents. I treat my girl right , take her out and buy her stuff. And I go to church every Sunday, But I’ve decided that just once I wanna do a really bad thing. I mean a really seriously bad thing. 'cause, ya know, like, we’re put on this earth with free will. We can choose to do this or that. We can choose to be good or bad. But sometimes I think most people are good and not bad only because they’re scared they might go to jail or hell or someplace. Some guy once said: “Anything done out of fear has no moral value.” Well, I think that’s right. I figure the only way you can be truly good is if you’ve tried being good, and you’ve tried being bad, and being good feels better.

So, what do you say…close enough?

As with most of the future worlds in the science fiction, you are not talking about the future. You are talking about the present. You are using the future as a way of giving a bit of room to move.

And, sure, getting away with it.

Invoke not reason. In the end it is too small a deity.

A lot smaller than God, right?

Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.

Uh, don’t forget to vote?

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.[/b]

That can’t be good.

Grief and loss are probably the most fearful creatures that exist. But loss shouldn’t be a fearful creature. It should be a creature of wisdom. It should teach us not to fear that tomorrow may never come, but live fully, as though the hours are melting away like seconds. Loss should teach us to cherish those we love, to never do anything that will result in regret, and to cheer on tomorrow with all of its promises of greatness. It’s easy and un-extraordinary to be frightened of life. It’s far more difficult to arm yourself with the good stuff despite all the bad and step foot into tomorrow as an everyday warrior.

On the other hand, you can overthink these things.

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

And he sure as shit didn’t eat bugs.

That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.

You know, when it actually is there.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do…

Wow, that sure takes me back some.

Only a few months into our marriage, writes the grandfather, we started marking off areas in the apartment as ‘Nothing Places,’ in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist.

Clearly, we need something like that here, don’t we?

[b]Haruki Murakami

I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next.[/b]

Going all the way back I suppose to never having even been born.

I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die, she said. I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.

Both at the same time is just overwhelming.

It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

And with any luck there will be no one to read them.

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don’t know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prision. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key.

I know, I know: This could never possibly happen to you.

Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.

Right, like that’s actually an option for most of us.

When there’s nothing to do, you do nothing slowly and intently.

Notice how he cites no examples of this.

[b]Thornton Wilder

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.[/b]

Will the love have been enough?
Yes.
No.
Maybe.

Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody’s thinking about you the whole time.

Unless of course you’re an expendable wage slave.

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer’s day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

So, would you like to know what I say?

Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.

I know: Let’s bring this to the attention of Don Trump.

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

Remember when that used to be the American Dream?

Dona Maria saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.

Probably in all the other worlds too.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

Dirt’s a funny thing,’ the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. [/b]

Dirt? Sounds about right.

I longed to know the world’s name.

Really, imagine trying to sum it all up in one word.

The law is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

The law? You get what you pay for. On K Street for example…

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

Let alone that it only gets worse.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) There is always something.
And I said, Maybe not on the Judge.
And he said, Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

And that would certainly include Don Trump.

The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful.

If not always intelligibly.

[b]Karl Popper

What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings.[/b]

On the other hand, you tell me: Where does Socrates end and Plato begin?

…if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

You might even say that this is applicable here too. You know, if it ever actually is.

But are there philosophical problems? The present position of English philosophy - my point of departure - originates, I believe, in the late Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein’s doctrine that there are none; that all genuine problems are scientific problems; that the alleged propositions or theories of philosophy are pseudo-propositions or pseudo-theories; that they are not false (if they were false, their negations would be true propositions or theories) but strictly meaningless combinations of words, no more meaningful than the incoherent babbling of a child who has not yet learned to speak properly.

Imagine if, one day, we are able to resolve this.

It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one’s partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner’s backgrounds differ.

Theoretically as it were.

…the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

If not the other way around.

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.

Like here for example. After all, the Kids are free to take over.