a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Charles Darwin

The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.[/b]

Time to invent the gods.

I have stated, that in the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to that of a warbler.

And who could have predicted that around the time of the Big Bang?

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.

From a letter of course. Almost anything goes there.

…ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge…

Okay, Kids, whaddya think?

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Are we even allowed to say something like that?

I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.

The part where mathematics becomes spooky.

[b]Jean Baudrillard

All societies end up wearing masks.[/b]

Not counting the ones they are turn into laws.

This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.

Yes, but isn’t this better left unsaid?

…the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone–remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design–but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.

Hell, he must live in mine. If not yours.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

Hey, whatever works.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cozily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Bottom line? Well, that’s it, right?

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

Surely that doesn’t include Trunpworld.

[b]Shirley Jackson

I had made sure of what to say to him before I came to the table. The Amanita phalloides, I said to him, holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting.[/b]

You never know when this stuff might be useful.

You see, said Tony, her voice still soft so as not to be overheard, but somehow fierce and angry, it frightens me when people try to grab at us like that. I can’t sit still and just let people watch me and talk to me and ask me questions. You see, she said again, as though trying to moderate her words and explain, they want to pull us back, and start us all over again just like them and doing the things they want to do and acting the way they want to act and saying and thinking and wanting all the things they live with every day.

For a start, let’s file this one under, “fuck them”.

We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others…

But not all others of course.

Name? the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
Name, I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
Age? she asked. Sex? Occupation?
Writer, I said.
Housewife, she said.
Writer, I said.
I’ll just put down housewife, she said.

This either resonates or it doesn’t.

I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

This either resonates or it doesn’t.

Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts.

And [even more so] to Boy Scouts. Though, sure, no knows exactly why.

[b]Stieg Larsson

It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee.[/b]

Admittedly, once stupid is involved it everything changes. And not just with security systems.

I believe that everyone has it in them to kill another person. In desperation, or hatred, or at least to defend themselves.

Or just for the hell of it. Of course, you know where I’ll be going here, right?

Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities.

Like, for example, life itself?

Much stronger boys in her class soon learned that it could be quite unpleasant to fight with that skinny girl. Unlike other girls in the class, she never backed down, and she would not for a second hesitate to use her fists or any weapon at hand to protect herself. She went around with the attitude that she would rather be beaten to death than take any shit.

Just ask this guy:

‘I am a rapist and a sadistic pig,’ if you get that tattoo removed I will carve it into your forehead, do you understand?

Oh, he understood alright.

What an excellent tool the internet is for freaks.

In particular those beyond good and evil freaks.

[b]so sad today

text me back to tell me you’re not going to text me back [/b]

Postmodern absurdity.

not in the fucking mood for nuclear war

Of course Don Trump may or may not take that into consideration.

by happy i mean moderately depressed

Yeah, we get that part.

by relaxed i mean very anxious

That part too.

there are so many amazing reasons not to like people

Or just stick to most obvious.

when you see the emptiness in everything i’ll be here for you

Better her than me, right?

[b]Stephen Fry

… Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas… And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: “I love you,” “Don’t go in there,” “Get out,” “You have no right to say that,” “Stop it,” “Why should I,” “That hurt,” “Help,” "Marjorie is dead.”[/b]

True enough. Well, not counting the last one. But that’s just me.

Mow the fuckers down.

So, what do you think, Don Trump’s foreign policy?

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen.

Hmm. Sounds like something you might overhear in the Oval Office.

Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.

You know, if you keep them to yourself.

‘If you wouldn’t mind coming with us, sir? I am arresting you now and will shortly make a formal charge at the station.’ I was so happy, so blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy that if I could have sung I would have sung. If I could have danced I would have danced. I was free. At last I was free. I was going on a journey now where every decision would be taken for me, every thought would be thought for me and every day planned for me. I was going back to school.

Sure, that’s one way to look at it.

Mental health is one of the last great taboos.

Not unlike the lack of it.

[b]Liane Moriarty

It was interesting that fury and fear could look so much the same.[/b]

Nope, not in my mirror they don’t.

Poor, poor Pandora. Zeus sends her off to marry Epimetheus, a not especially bright man she’s never even met, along with a mysterious covered jar. Nobody tells Pandora a word about the jar. Nobody tells her not to open the jar. Naturally, she opens the jar. What else has she got to do? How was she to know that all those dreadful ills would go whooshing out to plague mankind forevermore, and that the only thing left in the jar would be hope?

I know: One God is bad enough.

There is no special protection when you cross that invisible line from your ordinary life to that parallel world where tragedies happen. It happens just like this. You don’t become someone else. You’re still exactly the same. Everything around you still smells and looks and feels exactly the same.

You know, in theory.

Nick explained that an aperitif was a pre-dinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry with the tins of spaghetti.

Then Nick explained what a digestif drink was. In case Nora had never had one.

Relationships don’t stay the same. There isn’t time.

This sounds clever but probably isn’t.

Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective.

Either a man or a woman. In, for example, Trumpworld.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize—sometimes with astonishment—how happy we had been.[/b]

Actaully, I’ve never had a problem knowing [in the moment] when I was happy. I still don’t.

The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.

You know, if that’s really true.

…there are three kinds of men: those who make it their aim, as they say, to live their lives, eat, drink, make love, grow rich, and famous; then come those who make it their aim not to live their own lives but to concern themselves with the lives of all men – they feel that all men are one and they try to enlighten them, to love them as much as they can and do good to them; finally there are those who aim at living the life of the entire universe – everything, men, animals, trees, stars, we are all one, we are all one substance involved in the same terrible struggle.

He thought: Well, there must be a fourth kind then.

No. I don’t believe in anything. How many times must I tell you that? I don’t believe in anything anyone; only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than the others; not at all, not a little bit! He’s a brute like the rest! But I believe in Zorba because he’s the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you. When I die, everything’ll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom!

On the other hand: To the bottom of what?

Adam and Eve, sitting in Paradise, chatting:
If we could only open the gate and leave, says Eve.
To go where, my dearest?
If we could only open the gate and leave!
Outside is sickness, pain, death!
If we could only open the gate and leave!

Hmm, he pondered, maybe that explains Don Trump.

My son, I carry on as if I should never die.
And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.

Too close to call?

[b]Jeanette Winterson

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.[/b]

Human History by God. I’ll bet that would be a best seller.

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am.

I hear that.

I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.

I hear that too.

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

Hmm, I’ll have to try that.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

Of course sometimes it does.

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

He thought: Boy does that bring back memories.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

My, she said. We’re lucky that you found the place.
We’re always lucky, I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.[/b]

Just out of curiosity, does that actually work?

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.

Let’s file this one under, “I was happy once”.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Yes, another vaguely profound observation.

The bulls are my best friends.
I translated to Brett.
You kill your friends? she asked.

I’ll leave it at that.

To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare, señor. That’s rare and valuable.

Nope, never even came close. And I may have mentioned that before.

Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it?

And then one day it’s really gone. And you still didn’t.

[b]Michael Lewis

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.[/b]

This is the part where we follow the money. Again, in other words.

That’s what happens when you’re 37 years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

And then, at 67, really, really different.

Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.

Let’s prove it. Or, better still, disprove it.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos.

You know, for starters.

The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.

What say you, Mr Reasonable?

That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.

He thought: Give me some, I’ll take my chances.

[b]Elena Epanseshnik

Sometimes what stands between two people is freedom.[/b]

In other words, or the lack thereof.

There’s a special place in hell for people who don’t love. And it’s freezing.

I’m already starting to shiver.

What we long for the most and fear the most is called freedom.

Though not necessarily in that order.

That fine, fine line between fashion and fascism.

And not just in footwear.

The Good, the Bad and the Double Standards.

I’m all for it of course.

Don’t be perfect. Be better than that.

On the other hand, that may not even be possible.

[b]Alan Moore

Uglier than death backin’ outta the outhouse readin’ mad magazine and crazy as a football bat.[/b]

He may well have been the first to think this. You know, true or not.

I am tired of this Earth, these people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.

Of course he could actually do something about it.

If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we’d lobotomise him.

Me too.

Faith is for sissies who daren’t go and look for themselves.

Let’s decide if this time he has gone too far.

Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.

There’s still death though.

It seems as if from being a novelty nine-day wonder, the super-hero has become a part of American life. It’s here to stay.
For better, or for worse.

Still, better them than objectivists.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.[/b]

We could even give peace a chance.

Yesterday I wanted to turn inside out.

Really, why the would anyone want to do that? You know, whatever it even means.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

Our music of course not theirs.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless–it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

This is so true. It just doesn’t work anymore.

I regret how much I believed in the future.

More to the point, what’s left of it.

Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

On average.

[b]Haruki Murakami

Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.[/b]

Lots of really smart people say this. But no one is ever smart enough to know what it means.

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

Well, for starters, you can’t.

Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband’s. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn’t have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people’s standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”

Occasionally though it’s the husband borrowing the wife’s.

He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn’t take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them.
How very strange.
Yes, it is strange. I remember asking my employer, Then what do polar bears exist for? Yes, exactly, he said with a big smile. Then what do we exist for?

Of course polar bears don’t fuss with memes.

You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.

You know, if that’s what you’re looking for in it.

Sometimes we don’t need words. Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.

Obviously, this is as deep as you’ll ever need it to be.

[b]Thornton Wilder

Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. “I am alone, alone, alone,” he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, “We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes”.[/b]

That’s banal enough for some of us.

The best thing about animals is they don’t talk much.

At least not around us.

If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Either/or sure but which? And which ought it be?

He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer-- a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.

Two out of six. How about you?

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

Now of course as we all know that’s just not true. Even if it’s not ecactly false.

I think that it can be assumed that no adults are ever really ‘shocked’ — that being shocked is always a pose.

Actually, a few times I really was. And not just here.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

A Brief History of Ontology

1. Being
2. Becoming Being
3. Being and Nothing
4. Nothing and Being
5. Becoming Nothing
6. Nothing[/b]

And yet ironcially covering everything.

Dostoyevsky × Poe ÷ Baudelaire = Kafka
Kafka - Artaud = Borges
Borges - Borges = Twitter

Let’s add to this.

Philosophy I & II
101 I understand Aristotle.
102 And Kant.
103 And Husserl.
201 I don’t understand Aristotle.
202 Or Kant.
203 Or Husserl.

& III
I do understand iambiguous

The German word for the confusion you feel when a host of people express great enthusiasm for something that strikes you as deathly boring.

I think it is pretty much the same word in all languages. Or should be.

One brags about finishing Russian novels, understanding German novels, liking French novels, and knowing the names of American novels.

He means American comic books of course.

Ancient Philosophy: How do I live the good life?
Medieval Philosophy: Why does evil exist?
Modern Philosophy: When will I get a TED Talk?

TED talks. I refuse to Google it. So please don’t tell me.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do which is what you are only has meaning in relation to other people.[/b]

Still, even if that’s true philosophically, it’s bullshit. If, for example, you’re me.

She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl.

More to the point: the look on her face as she chomps down.

Lois looked edible, and you know it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue…

I know the type. Only her name is Lucy.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.

Let’s figure out what that is.

For life is a fire burning along a piece of string–or is it a fuse to a powder keg which we call God?–and the string is what we don’t know, our Ignorance, and the trail of ash, which, if a gust of wind does not come, keeps the structure of the string, is History, man’s Knowledge, but it is dead, and when the fire has burned up all the string, then man’s Knowledge will be equal to God’s Knowledge and there won’t be any fire, which is Life. Or if the string leads to a powder keg, then there will be a terrific blast of fire, and even the trail of ash will be blown completely away.

And then Big Bang 2.0 begins. With or without God.

The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power. But by God’s help. By His help and in His wisdom.

Try to imagine God reacting to this. Your God, for example.

[b]Philip Plait

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It’s because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.”[/b]

Of course that’s just common sense.

I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.

In other words, not just in the White House.

I am using the word theory as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means “guess.” To a scientist, you can bet your life on a theory. Remember, gravity is “just a theory” too.

Let’s move on then to the “theory of everything”.

Science asymptotically approaches reality.

For example, all the way up to infinity.

Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them.

Let’s find the one that may or may not have created us.

They say that even the brightest star won’t shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.

How about this: Sooner or latter, one way or another, we all die.

[b]Existential Comics

Humans are:
Aristotle: the animal that thinks.
Marx: the animal that works.
Kierkegaard: the animal that is sad all the time for no reason.[/b]

Pick three of them.

If I’m perfectly honest, I don’t really believe that I’m going to die. It just doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would ever happen.

He said in despair.

What people were looking for:
3000 BC: food.
200 AD: glory.
800 AD: salvation.
1600 AD: freedom.
2017 AD: a place to charge your phone.

Is that post-modern enough for you?

New rule in philosophy: if you don’t solve a problem in a couple thousand years, move on to something else.

Not much this doesn’t cover, right?

Hope may be for fools, but cynicism is for the lazy.

Even if that were true it wouldn’t apply to me. Well, unless of course it does.

Metaphysics: what exists?
Ethics: what should we do?
Epistemology: how do we know?
Existentialism: why even fucking care?

Well, perhaps because we’ll have all of eternity not to.