a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jane Smiley

We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them.[/b]

Ain’t that the truth? About, for example, almost everything.

It didn’t occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.

Drowned a few others though.

If you don’t furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows.

True. And, for some of us, considerably more.

If you lived in the same place long enough, everything reminded you of everything else.

I’ll let you know if that ever happens to me.

Arthur said, You must know that you don’t love children for being good or bad. I know you know that.
Why do you love them?
Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don’t know what’s coming and maybe you do.

Then it’s just a matter of whether, once they find out, they still love you.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Not always of course or who would still be around.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” James Joyce[/b]

In other words, better for some.

“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I should be so lucky, he thought.

“To be great is to be misunderstood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just for the record, does anyone here understand me?

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein

Need I say more?

“To be prepared is half the victory.” Miguel de Cervantes

Trust me: Don’t try that here.

“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be” Miguel de Cervantes

We’ll need a context of course.

[b]Han Kang

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.[/b]

What’s your rendition of this? You know, if the shoe fits.

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?

If we’re lucky only probably.

Why is it such a bad thing to die?

Dasein I suspect is riddled all through this one.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.

But then more or less out of the blue it’s gone forever.

After you died I could not hold a funeral, and so my life became a funeral.

Now that’s glum.

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.

One in a million in other words.

[b]Max Tegmark

With a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, the ERH implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis that our physical world is a mathematical structure.

This means that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematical, making us self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object.[/b]

In other words, we come mathematically?

Alas, I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. Whatever a politician wanted to do, he or she could find an economist as advisor who had argued for doing precisely that. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to increase government spending, so he listened to John Maynard Keynes, whereas Ronald Reagan wanted to decrease government spending, so he listened to Milton Friedman.

Gee, he thought, I wonder why it works like that?

Gradual declassification of records has revealed that some of these nuclear incidents carried greater risk than was appreciated at the time. For example, it became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beale had depth-charged an unidentified submarine that was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons, and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo.

Makes you wonder what we don’t know here and now.

Verification asks “Did I build the system right?,”
Validation asks “Did I build the right system?”

Two different things, right?

In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Not counting mine I’m guessing.

[b]In summary, time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is. So is change. In spacetime, the future exists and the past doesn’t disappear. When we combine Einstein’s classical spacetime with quantum mechanics, we get quantum parallel universes as we saw in Chapter 8. This means that there are many pasts and futures that are all real-but this in no way diminishes the unchanging mathematical nature of the full physical reality.

This is how I see it. However, although this idea of an unchanging reality is venerable and dates back to Einstein, it remains controversial and subject to vibrant scientific debate, with scientists I greatly respect expressing a spectrum of views. For example, in his book The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene expresses unease toward letting go of the notions that change and creation are fundamental, writing, “I’m partial to there being a process, however tentative…that we can imagine generating the multiverse.” Lee Smolin goes further in his book Time Reborn, arguing that not only is change real, but that indeed time may be the only thing that’s real. At the other end of the spectrum, Julian Barbour argues in his book The End of Time not only that change is illusory, but that one can even describe physical reality without introducing the time concept at all.[/b]

Or, sure, none of the above.

[b]Nein

Let’s be honest: if there’s one thing more political than politics, it’s spending more time with your family.[/b]

Including [of course] our family of friends here.

Monday. No better time to read Marx.

Anyone here know why?

Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs not mistaken.

Not unlike objectivism.

Twitter. Come for the epic meltdowns. Stay for your own.

Describe your own meltdown. If only for our entertainment.

Yes, friends, things are good. Also some places. Even a few people. Verbs are the problem.

Worse: embodying them.

Sure, we could do without civilization. But we’d miss the decline.

Here of course we’re part of it.

[b]Lee Smolin

The Five Great Problems in Theoretical Physics: Problem 1: Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity. Problem 2: Resolve the problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics, either by making sense of the theory as it stands or by inventing a new theory that does make sense. Problem 3: Determine whether or not the various particles and forces can be unified in a theory that explains them all as manifestations of a single, fundamental entity. Problem 4: Explain how the values of the free constants in the standard model of particle physics are chosen in nature. Problem 5: Explain dark matter and dark energy. Or, if they don’t exist, determine how and why gravity is modified on large scales. More generally, explain why the constants of the standard model of cosmology, including the dark energy, have the values they do.[/b]

All subsumed perhaps in explaining why anything exists at all. If that’s deemed a problem by you.

Quantum theory, in turn, has its own trouble with infinities. They appear whenever you attempt to use quantum mechanics to describe fields, like the electromagnetic field. The problem is that the electric and magnetic fields have values at every point in space. This means that there are an infinite number of variables (even in a finite volume there are an infinite number of points, hence an infinite number of variables). In quantum theory, there are uncontrollable fluctuations in the values of every quantum variable. An infinite number of variables, fluctuating uncontrollably, can lead to equations that get out of hand and predict infinite numbers when you ask questions about the probability of some event happening, or the strength of some force.

For some of course this is infinitely hard to understand. Not excluding myself by the way.

To understand what we mean when we say that space is discrete, we must put our minds completely into the relational way of thinking, and really try to see and feel the world around us as nothing but a network of evolving relationships. These relationships are not among things situated in space - they are among the events that make up the history of the world. The relationships define the space, not the other way around.

Admittedly I have no idea what the relationship is between this and all the relationships that actually concern me.

If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory, a theory that answers every question in terms of sensible finite numbers.

Imagine then the equation for that. Or the equation for what brought it all into existence.

Finiteness is not the only example in string theory of a conjecture that is widely believed but so far unproved.

Among other things, I don’t doubt that.

A singularity is a point or region in spacetime at which some physical quantity such as the density of mass or energy, the temperature, or the strength of the gravitational field, becomes infinite. Whenever they happen, they pose serious difficulties for physics because they signal a breakdown in the description of the world in mathematical terms.

Anything infinite here?

[b]Neil Gaiman

It is said that scattered through Despair’s domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.[/b]

Would you like me to introduce you to mine?

You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It’s that something’s going on in your head, and you can’t control it. I mean, It’s like there’s these bad worlds inside you. But it’s just you… it’s like you’re betraying yourself.

Really, come on, how do we wrap our heads around this?

There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.

Really, come on, how do we wrap our heads around this?

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber, she explained. There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere—it doesn’t all get used up at once.

I wonder if that’s true in Baltimore, he thought.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

And that’s true even if you buy a new mirror.

He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.

Must be an insanity thing, he figured.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Facebook: Let’s pretend the world is a friendly place
Instagram: Let’s pretend the world is a beautiful place
Twitter: Let’s pretend the world is going to survive past Thursday[/b]

Are there actually people around who know if this is true?

Happy May Day
Marx: Workers of the world, unite!
Luxemburg: Freedom is the freedom of dissenters!
Žižek: Be sure to buy the hipster t-shirt I’m endorsing!

On the other hand, another one bites the dust.

You can’t spell Monday without
Schopenhauer: m-o-a-n
Kierkegaard: m-a-d
Camus: our pitiless stumble into a merciless void of exacting doom

He probably just made this up.

Better to have loved and lost than to have realized that
Lacan: love is loss
Bataille: loss is love
Klein: there is no love
Beckett: there is only loss

Klein?

Schopenhauer: The will to life
Nietzsche: The will to power
Heidegger: The will to will
Wittgenstein: What will it take to shut you all up?

On the other hand, where are they now?

Philosophy: I want to know the answers
Literature: I want to know the questions
Economics: There are no questions
Politics: There are no answers

Which one is least likely not to be true?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.[/b]

Needless to say there was not much else.

In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.

Trust me though: Not always.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

This time, he means.

When I was young and filled with folly, I fell in love with melancholy.

If only because it rhymes.

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it’s not deserved.

The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.

And that goes straight to the brain.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.[/b]

Control. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.

Purpose. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?

Worse: a fucking tick.

Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person’s body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person’s object of undying hatred.

Well, sure, assuming they survive.

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.

Don’t you just hate that?

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

Actually, I have no idea how that might feel.

[b]God

If what other people think of you, what you think of yourself, and who you actually are ever met, the three of you wouldn’t recognize each other.[/b]

God’s own rendition of dasein no doubt.

The Feds now have more on Trump than I do.

Maybe, but not more than Rachel Maddow.

You are an asshole. This is the basis of all morality.

Doesn’t surprise me.

Only one species on Earth is so arrogantly alienated from its ecosystem it has to set aside a day just to reluctantly acknowledge it lives on a planet.

I’m guessing it’s not penguins.

Star Wars Day always reminds Me of the time I told Jesus I was his father and he had the same reaction Luke did.

There actually fucking is one!!!

Rudy Giuliani had one good day and that was the worst day in American history.

It’s Hell for him.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.[/b]

Control. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.

Purpose. In this day and age it’s never been trickier.

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?

Worse: a fucking tick.

Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person’s body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person’s object of undying hatred.

Well, sure, assuming they survive.

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.

Don’t you just hate that?

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

Actually, I have no idea how that might feel.

[b]C.G. Jung

The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.[/b]

I know, but what if it’s true?

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

Unless of course it’s your only option.

What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.

Unless of course it’s no longer an option.

To make what fate intends for me my own intention.

Clearly that makes no sense.

Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life – these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals, and on the other, continually threatens to paralyze and suppress the individual.

And we’re all stuck in the middle somewhere.

It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them.

Satyrs alone are debilitating.

[b]T.S. Eliot

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.[/b]

And look where that got me.

Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.

You know the one.

And if all that is meaningless, I want to be cured
Of a craving for something I cannot find
And of the shame of never finding it.

Like there actually is a cure.

If we all were judged according to the consequences
Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
And beyond our limited understanding
Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.

Another fucking objectivist. I think.

That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.

Like that will stop them.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Trust me: mine less than yours.

[b]The Dead Author

Sam Harris has two audiences: people who are so bored that they’ll even listen to someone as resentful as Sam Harris, and people who are so resentful that they’ll even listen to someone as boring as Sam Harris.[/b]

And to think that to some this guy is still a hero.

Sigmund Freud was born on this day in 1856, and people on the internet are still debating whether it’s ok to eat pussy.

If only in your dreams.

Today is the 205th birthday of Søren Kierkegaard and the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, who knew that romance doesn’t last, but neither does capitalism.

Let’s decide: Who came closest?

Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ taught me that sometimes it’s ok to stay in bed.

Not unlike ‘The Trial’.

Solitude: being alone.
Loneliness: thinking that other people are not.

Let’s confirm this.

Dante. Hell yeah.

Literally perhaps.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.[/b]

Or, like me: After a certain age, you felt a need to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.

Well, said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they’re not what you thought. And that’s what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy.

And who hasn’t had a few of those.

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star…

On the local access channel say.

Apparently, something can happen inside someone you love—it can just happen somehow—and like magic she thinks that she’s had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone.

I know: Like me, you wrote the book.

Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.

Or, for that matter, a father.

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

Either that or great bitterness.

[b]Kurt Cobain

Believe everything you read.[/b]

What a kidder!

I’m on my time with everyone.

On the other hand, who wouldn’t let him?

I only remember a few things about Jimmy Carter. He had big lips and liked peanuts. I now know that Jimmy Carter was and is a good man.

As United States presidents go.

Words suck. I mean, every thing has been said. I can’t remember the last real interesting conversation I’ve had in a long time. Words aren’t as important as the energy derived from music, especially live.

Clearly not a philosopher. Let alone a serious one.

I never went out of my way to say anything about my drug use. I tried to hide it as long as I could. The main reason was that I didn’t want some 15-year-old kid who likes our band to think it’s cool to do heroin, you know? I think people who glamorize drugs are fucking assholes and, if there’s a hell, they’ll go there.

Anyway, he meant well.

I am not well read, but when I do read, I read well.

Let’s decide if that is good enough.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I’m always a little skittish around people. Places. Things.[/b]

If nothing else.

we’re only making plans for nihilists

Now that Nigel is taken care of.

hold my hair while I die

Sure, why not.

doktor: your physical strength and stamina are extraordinary
me: for a dead man
doktor: sure

On the other hand, how extraordinary would it have to be?

keeping up with the kierkegaards

Only in Denmark of course.

void and his dead god

The comedy act I’m guessing.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Hamlet’s madness really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws – riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public – knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.
And talking to himself.
And talking to himself.[/b]

On the other hand, nobody’s perfect.

Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.

In case you confuse them.

It’s where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.

Who could doubt it?

If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.

Some don’t even stop there.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

Though not to be confused with motel rooms.

A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

And not just up in the clouds of abstraction.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and- produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction under- neath. Until such time as it will have to hear.[/b]

He means the fucking liberals, right?

It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.

Is that even possible anymore?

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best.

So, did he?

Couldn’t one go right away, to the far ends of the earth, and be free from it all?
One could not. The far ends of the earth are not five minutes from Charing Cross nowadays. While the wireless is active, there are no far ends of the earth.

Imagine then his reaction to the internet.

Only youth has a taste of immortality.

And that too shall pass.

As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness in her life that affected her.

And then the other one.