[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.
[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]
Or, sure, for some, not better.
“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” William of Ockham
And then the entities that should never have been at all.
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
The man was a fucking genius.
“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Clearly not an option for me.
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Also, when we are completely fucking wrong.
“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions—to define, classify, control, and regulate people.” Michel Foucault
You know, generally.
[b]Svetlana Alexievich
Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it. To hell with it![/b]
A global supermarket as it were. To hell with it or not.
I hear about death so often that I don’t even notice anymore. Have you ever heard kids talk about death? My seventh-graders argue about it: is it scary or not? Kids used to ask: where do we come from? How are babies made? Now they’re worried about what’ll happen after the nuclear war.
And not just in Chernobyl.
I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all I’ve read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives weren’t entirely wasted.
Me, I’m still clinging to the faintest of minute hopes.
There you are: a normal person. A little person. You’re just like everyone else—you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about.
Anyone here ever been there, done that?
We don’t need anything. Just listen to us and try to understand. Society is good at doing things, ‘giving’ medical help, pensions, flats. But all this so-called giving has been paid for in very expensive currency. Our blood.
Though hardly ever theirs.
We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful socialist society.
Or of late: We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful capitalist society.
[b]Robert Musil
You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody’s been living for them, not even for a single hour.[/b]
I may myself not be that cynical. But point taken.
A man matters, his experiences matter, but in a city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves, and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.
Not to mention the general descriptions.
A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.
Or the failure of his enemies.
…a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
Name one.
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
Especially their ideology. Either that or ours.
His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.
Among other things, it’s not easy to do.
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“The individual is the product of power.” Michel Foucault[/b]
Go ahead, try telling him that. Or, for that matter, her.
“What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?” Michel Foucault
Tell that to, among others, Satyr. In regard to, say, homosexuality?
“I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.” Michel Foucault
Though clearly not of the stained glass sort.
“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Actually, it’s in being able to make it go away.
“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” Aristotle
Not counting the slaves of course. And by definition no women.
“Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Unless of course God is not dead.
[b]Jane Smiley
…the two of them prayed to Jesus that they might learn their lessons sooner rather than later, and that they would be gentle lessons rather than hard lessons.[/b]
And then later Heaven rather than Hell.
He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.
Needless to say, for better or for worse.
She could not imagine what she could do to reconstruct all the things she enjoyed, and she could hardly remember what it was that she had enjoyed.
Clearly then it’s time to move on.
Her stare was like a small room he couldn’t get out of.
And, then, as it segued to a glare, getting smaller all the time.
There were so many things Rosanna could have been besides a farm wife, she thought. But it was not a source of regret—it was a source of pride.
Okay, but should it be?
I thought about having sex with Jess Clark and I could feel my flesh turn electric at these thoughts, could feel sensation gather at my nipples, could feel my vagina relax and open, could feel my lips and fingertips grow sensitive enough to know their own shapes.
Consider it done?
[b]Han Kang
She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.[/b]
Or: He’s a good man, she thought. The kind of man whose goodness is oppressive.
Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves – living, in other words.
On the other hand, here, one size definitely doesn’t fit all.
When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there’s simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it.
And with or without you.
Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.
And, in some cases, neither are you.
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.
You either get this or you don’t. But don’t doubt that you almost certainly will.
The pain feels like a hole swallowing her up, a source of intense fear and yet, at the same time, a strange, quiet peace.
Reminds me of this: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”
[b]so sad today
cause of death: got out of bed[/b]
Still #1 though: Being born.
i was fine till you gave me hope
Don’t even think about it.
you need to learn how to be fake better
Or real better.
there should be an option besides life and death
Let’s think up one.
a romantic obsession a day keeps the meaningless nature of existence away
No, not really, he thought.
“sorry about all the tweets” — my tombstone
Don’s too.
[b]Max Tegmark
On January 25, 1995, Russian president Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. [/b]
Among other things, it’s a miracle we’re all still around.
If the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct, then our Universe is a mathematical structure, and from its description, an infinitely intelligent mathematician should be able to derive all these physics theories.
Where’s James S. Saint when we need him?
…in the external reality of general relativity, you’re an extended braidlike pattern in a static four-dimensional spacetime…
Wow, who woulda thunk it?
Imagine a thought experiment where a perfect clone of me is built asleep, complete with all my memories, and is only woken up long enough to perceive a single observer moment. He’d still feel that time flowed from a complex and interesting past, even though he got to experience only that one moment. This means that the subjective perceptions of duration and change are qualia, basic instantaneous perceptions just as redness, blueness or sweetness.
Thought experiment indeed!
…there’s no such thing as brown light! The color brown doesn’t exist in the external reality, but only in your internal reality: it’s simply what you perceive when seeing dim orange light against a darker background.
Is shit still brown then?
Above we worried about how to think about our initial conditions, and we now have a radical answer: this information isn’t fundamentally about our physical reality, but about our place in it. The vast complexity we observe is an illusion in the sense that the underlying reality is quite simple to describe, and what requires close to a googol bits to specify is just our particular address in the multiverse.
Just one more thing we’ll take to the grave.
[b]Lee Smolin
Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found—those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes—were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches.[/b]
Actually, I didn’t know that.
Einstein’s theory of gravity is a theory of causal structure. It tells us that the essence of spacetime is causal structure and that the motion of matter is a consequence of alterations in the network of causal relations. What is left out from the notion of causal structure is any measure of quantity or scale.
Sounds plausible to me.
[b]Before Einstein, geometry was thought to be part of the laws. Einstein revealed that the geometry of space is evolving in time, according to other, deeper laws.
It is important to absorb this point completely. The geometry of space is not part of the laws of nature. There is therefore nothing in those laws that specifies what the geometry of space is. Thus, before solving the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, you don’t have any idea what the geometry of space is. You find out only after you solve the equations.[/b]
Next up: Before Newton.
Science is not about what’s true. It’s about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by way of public evidence.
And then there’s the stuff that, say, the engineers believe.
The geometry of a universe is very much like the grammatical structure of a sentence. Just as a sentence has no structure and no existence apart from the relationships between the words, space has no existence apart from the relationships that hold between the things in the universe. If you change a sentence by taking some words out, or change their order, its grammatical structure changes. Similarly, the geometry of space changes when the things in the universe change their relationships to one another.
You know, as a general description.
For simple black holes, which do not rotate and have no electric charge, the values of the temperature and entropy can be expressed very simply. The area of the horizon of a simple black hole is proportional to the square of its mass, in Planck units. The entropy S is proportional to this quantity. In terms of Planck units, we have the simple formula S = .25 A / h G. Where A is the area of the horizon, and G is the gravitational constant.
Not to be confused with the considerably more complex black holes.
[b]Neil Gaiman
And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they’re meant to.[/b]
Either that or it never went at all.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.
This may well be even deeper than I think.
Names come and names go.
Not unlike everything else.
Have you thought about what it means to be a god? asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people’s minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you’re a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.
And surely not just the God of Abraham and Moses.
If Hell is other people…then Purgatory is airports.
Either that or strip malls.
If the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the streets with flowerpots on their heads.
Or, I’ll bet, something altogether different.
[b]Edgar Allan Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary…[/b]
Tell me about it.
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
Whatever that is.
All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.
My guess? Not even close to all.
To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.
Sounds about right, doesn’t it?
…the truth is, I am heartily sick of this life & of the nineteenth century in general.
Of course things are all so much better now.
If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul; you haven’t experienced poetry.
You know, if you have one.
[b]so sad today
just gonna do this to make sure it’s still a bad idea[/b]
On the other hand, it’s never not been.
sets healthy boundaries
lights them on fire
On impulse no doubt.
your “positive energy” scares the shit out of me
There are a few of that sort here too.
one problem with depression is that when good things happen you still have depression
Still, better good than bad.
I don’t feel at peace unless I’m torturing myself
Or, sure, torturing you.
maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s because people were mean to her in junior high
Maybe both.
[b]Jeff VanderMeer
I told him point-blank so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.[/b]
I assign you the task of applying this to yourself.
He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.
And [still] too close to call.
I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.
Tell him that. Though it may well be that he feels much the same way about you.
There’s nothing to this world, he said, but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can on that information.
Needless to say that, for all practical purposes, this is rather hard to pin down.
Control thought of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: "Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake?
Of course that’s off in the future. If we’re lucky.
I didn’t answer her. All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.
Depending on, for example, the question.
[b]Robert Crumb
I’m just a negative person, a deeply negative person. I see the worst aspects of everything. [/b]
He wondered: Have I finally met my match?
At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else.
So, is that good enough?
When I listen to old music, that’s one of the few times that I actually have a kind of love for humanity.
Or, for some of us, new music too.
I’m an outsider. I will always be an outsider.
I hear that.
I always had a sketchbook with me when I was young. I was hiding behind it, basically, hiding behind drawing because I couldn’t cope with people in real life…
I hear that too.
I draw the line at some things. Some things I won’t do for any amount of money. Like for instance, there’s a couple of CEOs of very large corporations that offered me lots of money to do special pictures for them. And I just refused to do that. Even if it was a million dollars I wouldn’t do it.
You can’t help but wonder: Pictures of what?
[b]C.G. Jung
The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person’s intellectual life.[/b]
Wasn’t this Einstein’s complaint too?
Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.
Then I’m sure as shit out of luck.
If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly.
But only if you think along the same lines that Satyr does.
The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.
Of course Marx had an altogether different rendition of this.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations…
Imagine then his reaction to the world today.
The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.
Talk about the lesser of two evils.
[b]Elena Epaneshnik
There are two types of people:
And now we only need science to prove it.
There’s a special place in Hell for people who ruin your life.
On the other hand, why wait for that.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would still be one of the greatest songs ever even if it were shortened to ‘any way the wind blows’ at the end.
Let’s just agree that’s debatable.
The day I realised my English wasn’t so bad was when I watched ‘Trainspotting’, understanding every single word, reading the subtitles.
I dare you to watch it without them.
Say something sexy in Russian?
Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’y …
So, what am I missing here?
The real tragedy of life is that sometimes you are shamelessly happy.
So, what am I missing here?
[b]T.S. Eliot
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.[/b]
Let’s file this one under, “Yeah, right”.
For he will do
As he do do
And there’s no doing anything about it!
Let’s file this one under, “We’ll see about that.”
The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.
They still do.
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Still, no getting around keys in this world.
In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.
In a world of fugitives, maybe. But not in this one.
But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
That leaves only the best of all possible worlds.
If there even is one.