a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Thomas Aquinas

Beware the man of a single book.[/b]

The Bible comes to mind. That or Atlas Shrugged.

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.

And this explains…what exactly?

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

Actually, of course, it’s the study of what men thought the truth was. And then every once in a while a woman.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

First person subjunctive as it were.

How is it they live in such harmony, the billions of stars, when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds?

Of course now we know that harmony can be anything but.

I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it.

How deep is that?
No, really, how deep is that?

[b]Jean Baudrillard

Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.[/b]

So, Mr. Trump, where do you fit in here?

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

God: The Simulation. Coming to a universe near you.

Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland…digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this “ideological” blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

Did Walt know this?

We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us—because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand—the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests—the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature—only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value—leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand.

I know: Sounds like something that Satyr might profess.

One has never said better how much “humanism”, “normality”, “quality of life” were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

And [obviously] not just in theory.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

In other words, when it’s not sinking.

[b]Shirley Jackson

Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns.[/b]

Not counting all the fears that aren’t of course.

The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.

Or [of course]: The gap between the philosophy she wrote and the philosophy she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable. At least I suspect as much.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her.
It isn’t fair, she said.
A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Lots of villages like that, aren’t there?

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

Of course most pointless violence isn’t really the point at all, is it?

Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister’s shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society.

Custom. The first objectivism we might call it.

He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education.

So, who does this remind you of, Satyr?

[b]Joyce Maynard

There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.[/b]

Either that or no meaning at all.

It’s like life: sometimes the littlest thing turns out to be the most important.

It’s mostly still the biggest thing though.

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman’s folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man’s shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.

He thought: That’ll never catch on.

Daughters, he told her as they dug. Nothing better than a good daughter.

Unless of course she’s a son.

My mother didn’t believe in germs but I did. Germs are something they made up to distract people from what they should really be worried about, she said. Germs are natural. It’s the things people do you have to worry about.

Right, like they both don’t have a point.

I love him, Patty said. But our dad is a loser.

Of course we haven’t heard his side.

[b]Han Kang

Why, is it such a bad thing to die?[/b]

My guess: It depends on who you ask.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

Why don’t we just keep this our own little secret.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.

On the other hand, we will – someday – have all of eternity not to think about it.

Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time.

That’s how it can work alright.

She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

Meaning yours better be hers.

She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.

Wow, how many of us can say we never even knew the bars were there?

[b]Stieg Larsson

It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding.[/b]

Of course we all know how that turned out.

When this is all over I’m going to found an association called ‘The Knights of the Idiotic Table’ and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You’re all members.

Of course we all know how that turned out.

When their love was not reciprocated, it could quickly turn to violent hatred.

Then they all end up on Dateline or 48 Hours.

Isn’t it fascinating that Nazis always manage to adopt the word freedom?

Hell, everyone wraps that one around them.

As a girl, she was a legal prey, especially if she was dressed in a worn black leather jacket and had pierced eyebrows, tattoos, and zero social status.

So, among other things, she learned to push back.

Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet.

Of course we might ask ourselves the same thing. Including the ones that really ought to.