a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:
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.

[b]Charles Darwin

Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.[/b]

Nope, not this time.

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

Sure, it might be a true story.

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.

You can’t help but wonder if, some day, it will be our turn.

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

Just as God intended it to be.

One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.

In other words, whatever that means.

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

Up to and including us as. Well, some of us.

[b]The Dead Author

Cynicism: You can’t change the world.
Skepticism: You can’t change the world?
Sarcasm: You can change the world.[/b]

Nihilism: All of the above.
[size=50][mine anyway][/size]

Those were the days when the most influential Russian nihilist was Bakunin and not Trump.

Hmm, so much for pinning that down.

What is love?
Ovid: Art.
Shakespeare: Blind.
Hegel: Unity.
Freud: Narcissism.
Kierkegaard: Good.
Žižek: Evil.
Nietzsche: Beyond good & evil.

No, really, what is love?

History usually repeats itself not because people don’t remember the past, but because they can’t forget it.

So, they just drag it along.

People are never as simple as they may seem and never as complex as they may think of themselves.

Unless, of course, they are.

Republicans are facing the tough choice of whether to be more afraid of Mexicans or of Russians.

On the other hand, perhaps it is all just…politics? I mean, that’s possible, right?

[b]Thomas Hobbes

Hell is truth seen too late.[/b]

Or [sometimes] when it is seen at all.

The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

Of course some things are better left unsaid.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry… no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Well, until we all decided one day to become civilized.

Leisure is the mother of Philosophy.

Let’s figure out who the father is.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

And, as often as not, on both sides.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

Let’s translate that into trumpspeak.

A great leap in the dark

Unfortunately, some land here.

[b]Jean Baudrillard

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.[/b]

Why? We’re just lucky, I guess.

Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.

Believe it or not, this takes practice. Unless that’s just me.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

And the whiter the better.

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void… That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.

Not including us of course.

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

Well, if only in theory.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

Unless, perhaps, you’re just in the bathroom taking a piss.