a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Greek tragedy: You tried but you’re doomed
French tragedy: You mostly tried but you’re doomed
German tragedy: You’re doomed but it’s funny[/b]

American tragedy: We’re doomed but don’t forget to vote!

French philosophy: I can
German philosophy: I can’t
Russian philosophy: I can’t even

American philosophy: I cant.

[b]Basic Laws of Academia

  1. Inquiry is sacred
  2. Knowledge is sacred
  3. Relationships with other intellectuals are sacred
  4. Nothing is sacred[/b]

See if you can spot the irony here.

[b]A Brief History of Disappointing Ideals

  1. Freedom
  2. Economic justice
  3. No-fault divorce
  4. All-you-can-eat buffets
  5. The most votes wins[/b]

And that’s before you get to immortality and everlasting salvation.

[b]A Brief History of Poetry

  1. Beauty
  2. beauty
  3. BEAUTY
  4. “Beauty”
  5. ytuaeb
  6. b-e-a-u-t-y
  7. $$$[/b]

On the other hand, nowadays money is the root of all beauty. But it will cost you to find out why.

Time is
Aristotle: an ever-vanishing now
Kant: an a priori form of inner sense
Heidegger: the condition of possibility of care
Žižek: money

Of course it’s money to everyone now.

[b]Shirley Jackson

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader.[/b]

And here that would be me and you.

I disliked having a fork pointed at me and I disliked the sound of the voice never stopping; I wished he would put food on the fork and put it into his mouth and strangle himself.

Or, sure, you can help him along.

People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.

You know, like we are.

I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider’s web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.

Clearly, we all have our own rendition of this.

We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.

If not entirely upside down.

People, the doctor said sadly, are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.

Or, if they’re particularly desperate, a philosophical ring.

[b]Stieg Larsson

Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.[/b]

Just ask Nils Bjurman.

Always retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt unmanageable. That was a basic rule of survival. Don’t lift a finger for a lost cause.

On the other hand, what if the cause can be won? Back again to taking or not taking a leap.

To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it’s an absolute duty.

You know, if you can actually pull it off.

There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer.

Preferably one with a claw.

She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck You.

Some have stared at me for a whole second.

We need to have a talk on the subject of what’s yours and what’s mine.

And then the next thing you know, they’re fucking.

[b]Stephen Fry

My real dissatisfaction is with my dissatisfaction. How dare I be so discontent? How dare I? Or being discontent why cannot I shut up about it?[/b]

Hell, he’s only human, right?

Animals have this in common with one another: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves.

Instinctively as it were.

Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

Let’s pin down where they overlap, and where they don’t.

Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature. They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander’s words, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’.

On the other hand, as I suspect, sexual orientation has got nothing to do with it.

You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.

Holes, after all, are holes.

…people who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.

Let’s just say there are clearly some exceptions.

[b]Carson McCullers

To me it is the irony of fate, she said. The way they come here. Those moths could fly anywhere. Yet they keep hanging around the windows of this house.[/b]

On the other hand, they probably don’t give it much thought.

You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around your name.

More to the point, you only have so much control over it.

But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it’s as plain as the shining sun - the don’t-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can’t see it.

And now they’ve done gone and elected Don Trump.

It was almost three o’clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.

Actually, anywhere between 2 and 4.

They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?

Modern love: for better or for better still.

I expect he done read more books than any white man in this town. He done read more books and he done worried about more things. He full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back to religion. All his troubles come down just to that.

Of course we’ll need to hear his side too.

[b]Liane Moriarty

If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.[/b]

More to the point, who cares, as long as everyone else does.

They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.

Probably, but then there are people like me.

But every time she tried yoga she found herself silently chanting her own mantra: I’m so boooored, I’m so boooored.

She neglected the “spiritual” part, didn’t she?

Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.

But not you, right?

Bonnie and her mum are both members of Amnesty International, said Abigail.
Of course they are, murmured Madeline. This must be how Jennifer Aniston feels, thought Madeline, whenever she hears about Angelina and Brad adopting another orphan or two.

Of course, that was then, wasn’t it?

When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.

In other words, fuck Kant.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink![/b]

If the shoe fits, right? And I suspect it fits quite comfortably here.

The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.

Well, aside from this perhaps.

Is he good? Or is he bad? That’s the only thing I ask nowadays. And as I grow older—I’d swear this on the last crust I eat—I feel I shan’t even go on asking that! Whether a man’s good or bad, I’m sorry for him, for all of 'em. The sight of a man just rends my insides, even if I act as though I don’t care a damn! There he is, poor devil, I think, he also eats and drinks and makes love and is frightened, whoever he is: he has his God and his devil just the same, and he’ll peg out and lie as stiff as a board beneath the ground and be food for worms, just the same. Poor devil! We’re all brothers! All worm-meat!

Of course nowadays the worms never make it into the coffins. But point taken.

You were saying you wanted to open the people’s eyes. All right, you just go and open old uncle Anagnosti’s eyes for him! You saw how his wife had to behave before him, waiting for his orders, like a dog begging. Just go now and teach them that women have equal rights with men, and that it’s cruel to eat a piece of the pig while the pig’s still raw and groaning in front of you, and that it’s simple lunacy to give thanks to God because he’s got everything while you’re starving to death!..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!

And then one day it dawns on you: he’s right.
Not that he actually is, of course.

Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.

More to the point, how is this applicable to us?

Life’s true face is the skull.

One at a time as it were.

[b]Nein

If you need me, I’ll be pivoting. From impotent rage to quiet desperation.[/b]

Unless they actually do impeach him.

It’s not you. It’s your moral relativism. Which, yes, is just as bad as mine.

Of course I wrote the book on that. Or, rather, I was intending to.

Signifying nothing. It’s harder than it looks.

Really? Then try signifying less than nothing.

Theory. Still my favorite conspiracy.

If not for all practical purposes.

1. Understand world.
2. Change world.
3. Try hitting undo.

Repeat as necessary.

Sorry. I don’t do Praxis.

Not even theoretically?

[b]Jeanette Winterson

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.[/b]

Sure, as long as it’s stuff that we like.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.

That’ll do it.

…every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There’s only now.

Right, like knowing this helps.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

I know: If only this could actually make sense.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

True. Or false. If you don’t take it literally.

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Let’s file this one [obviously] under, “deep, man”.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Religion is the opium of the poor.[/b]

In other words, them especially.

Now I am depressed myself, I said. That’s why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.

Don’t try to pin this down.

Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.

I’m trying to imagine PETA’s reaction.

For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

On the other hand, what does nowhere lead to? Here, perhaps?

Do not think about sin, he thought.

Let’s just say he’s not off to a good start.

And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

I know this is true, of course, but I just don’t believe it.

[b]Existential Comics

History of Enlightenment philosophy: Things were going generally fine, then Immanuel Kant came along and fucked everything up for everyone.[/b]

Really? I thought that was Nietzsche.

one thing that I like about dogs is that they are dogs

True objectively one suspects.

Things were never good. Where did people get this idea that things were good?

Well, believe it or not, for some folks, things really were good. Or, at any rate, a hell of a lot better than they are now.

How to be a philosopher: say how things that don’t seem like social constructs are actually, in fact, social constructs.

Hmm, let’s run this one by Satyr…

Self help book: become an übermensch in these five easy steps.

Or just start packin’.

How to live the authentic life: buy your own bullshit.

After all, no one has to know but you.

What Hegel didn’t realize is that in the future ideas won’t move towards the truth, but towards whatever has the biggest advertising budget.

Or anything embedded in the military industrial complex.

[b]Bernard Malamud

But she had recently come to think that in such unhappy times–when the odds were so high against personal happiness–to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best two people could was what really mattered.[/b]

Okay, okay, but why do they keep rubbing it in? Unless perhaps that’s my own doing.

He remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had - a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.

Me too. And it’s not getting any younger.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

I know: What would Freud say?

A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don’t want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he’s on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn’t see us and he doesn’t care.

But not your God, right?

She is not for you. She is a wild one–wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.

Or, for that matter, any ecclesiastic.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

Instead, I withdrew from the task. Unless you count this.

[b]David Byrne

There’s a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech, said Purves. That’s the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than the ratios of Pythagoras. The reason doesn’t have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.[/b]

Like that explains…what exactly?

I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.

Let’s file this one under “the games we play”.
If only more or less self-consciously.

It was rumored that the length of the CD was determined by the duration of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, because that was Norio Ohga’s favorite piece of music, and he was the president of Sony at the time. Philips had designed a CD with an 11.5 cm diameter, but Ohga insisted that a disc must be able to hold the entire Beethoven recording. The longest recording of the symphony in Polygram’s archive was 74 minutes, so the CD size was increased to 12 cm diameter to accommodate the extra data.

Actually, I didn’t know that.

I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I’m deeply conservative as well—if a song establishes itself within a pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn’t play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two?

Let’s file this one under, “you think too much.” Or, sure, maybe not.

Recordings aren’t time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it’s morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can “get into” clubs virtually, “sit” in concert halls you can’t afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don’t understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.

In other words, yet another manifestation of “I”.

The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

Let’s just say this: not me. I never matched the music to my mood, but let the music create the mood itself. Very hard to explain though.

[b]Alan Moore

Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real. Then there’s the mind, half-focused on the TV, the settee, the clock. This ghostly knot of memory, idea and feeling that we call ourself also exists, though not within the measurable world our science may describe.

Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we, like Faust, might better know them; deal with them; become them.

Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably ezdst, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love’s name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred?

The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map.

Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.[/b]

Besides, as often as not, we act as though it is. And that’s what generates, among other things, consequences.

Tis Dante I prefer. In his Inferno he suggests the one true path from Hell lies at its very heart…and that in order to escape, we must instead go further in.

He thought: This makes about as much sense as believing that there is a Hell.

Oh, they said God was dead, all those beatniks and snooty-ass Frenchmen. Not me. I knew better. I said to them, “Wait, boys! Don’t break cover yet awhile. He might be faking. I mean, they thought Saddam was dead. And the novel. And Glenn Close in that last scene of Fatal Attraction.” That’s what I said. But did they listen? Ohh no. They went right ahead and organized God’s funeral. Well, don’t count your chickens before they come home to roost…

You know, if He did once in fact actually exist.

Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble. That dark human clot can never melt into a lucid, clear suspension. Our detective fiction tells us otherwise: everything is just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, and you have solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce the complex events.

In other words, let’s go deeper than how or who or where or when; let’s figure out [once and for all] why.

To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.

In other words [perhaps] fuck them and the superheroes they rode in on.

Without my face, nobody knows. Nobody knows who I am.

But: don’t stop with them.
If you know what I mean.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.[/b]

Nope, never once dreamed of the afterlife. How about you?

Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about “eating animals”, they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

Not counting chickens of course. And certainly not fish.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values—or betray them—lies in the food we put on our plates.

Clearly then you are either one of us [the good people] or one of them [the bad].

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can’t tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

She ought to run for president.

If the sun were to explode, you wouldn’t even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm.

So, for all we know, it has already exploded.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it.

Or [if you’re a Kid]: We had nothing to say to each other, but lots of ways to say it.

[b]Haruki Murakami

If you try to use your head to think about things, people don’t want to have anything to do with you.[/b]

And not just here.

The fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets.

You know, when it’s not one of your greatest liabilities.

Huge organizations and me don’t get along. They’re too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.

Not unlike most small organizations.

People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is…The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.

Okay, I’ll explain to you what that means if you’ll at least admit it’s true.

Listen, Kafka. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man. That’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy—according to Aristotle—comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.

Fate chooses man. But only if, for example, you let it.

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people.

Let’s decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

[b]Thornton Wilder

Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.[/b]

That and objectivism. Nonsense on steroids as it were.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Unless perhaps it’s a hopelessly convoluted agglomeration of both.

This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

Me? Well, what I can tell you about it is even less than that.

Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.

If only literally.

…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 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.

And not just in our town.

It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

You know, when it actually is that way.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

Dying—shucks! If you kin handle the living, what’s to be afraid of the dying?[/b]

Right, like that’s all it takes.

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

This takes me all the way back to Sharon. My own Summer of 42.

Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep.

And that’s all the difference in the world, isn’t it?

…a friend of your youth is the only friend you ever have…

Of course for some of us this is actually true.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.

Unless you forge it out of words.

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

And here I point that out all the time, don’t I?