a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Ambrose Bierce

The covers of this book are too far apart.[/b]

Lots of books like that, right?

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

Fortunately though that’s not always true.

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Here? Let’s name names.

Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

The gall!

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be.

Let me get back to you on that one.

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

More or less blind as it were.

[b]Existential Comics

A nihilist is just an egoist who has convinced themselves that not caring about stuff makes them better than other people.[/b]

I must be the other kind then. Or, sure, maybe not.

At least under feudalism the Lords would read Geothe and discussed philosophy and stuff. Today’s capitalists overlords are a bunch of petty crooks and scammers who sleazed their way to the top, and will sell out the planet itself for a bit of extra cash.

The guy just hates capitalists.

Thesis: twitter is terrible.
Antithesis: twitter is good.
Synthesis: never stop posting my dudes.

There are of course other syntheses.

Do not call yourself an existentialist unless you’ve been a relation which relates itself to its own self, or that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; not the relation but that the relation relating itself to its own self.

Okay, I’m not then.

The hard truth that Communists don’t want to face is that no matter how much theory they read, they will still have to look up how to spell “bourgeoisie” every time.

Or you can just call them “the fucking pigs”.

It’s important to read Hegel to remind yourself how stupid you are.

Well, that did work for me. Or, rather, it used to.

[b]Tom Stoppard

I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.[/b]

Or at least put a dent in it?

Death is the ultimate negative.

Or, for some, life.

…the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Strangely enough it all works out in the end…it’s a mystery.

Unless, strangely enough, it’s not.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify–capriciously–their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships–and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes–husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer…

You know, if that matters to you.

We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.

You know, if that matters to you.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Indeed, in this day and age, it’s all but mandatory.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day.[/b]

And then there’s all the great words that we no longer use here.

The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell and paints the inside walls sky-blue and blocks up the door and says he’s in heaven.

Well, some do.

Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you’ll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography–looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.

Is this something that’s important to know?

Ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Well, maybe his ideal.

If only you could tell them that living and spending isn’t the same thing.

Of course it’s only gotten much, much worse.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Tell that to G.I. Jane.

[b]The Dead Author

If you’re gonna obsess over it, be compulsive about it.[/b]

Over what you might ask?

God is dead but I still don’t believe in myself.

For me of course that’s not even possible.

Nietzsche is popular because he lets you take credit for your successes. Kafka is popular because he lets you blame the world for your failures.

Does this even make sense?

Please love me, it’s for an experiment.

Never tried that before.

Knowing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s first names in the right order counts as philosophical expertise even in Germany.

And then there’s this one:
Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia
Of course he’s just a cartoon character.

Depression teaches you that just because you don’t care about anything doesn’t mean you can’t worry about everything.

No getting around your responsibilities is there?

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

There’s something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person’s courage in the face of danger.[/b]

Sometimes even obscene. But, really, who is to say?

They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we’d never become real people. That’s how we’re made. If we just work each day and eat well—that would be strange and intolerable!

Conpletely ridiculous of course. Except for the part that’s true.

The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident. And then they show the dosimeter again, measuring some fish on a plate, or a chocolate bar, or some pancakes at an open pancake stand. It was all a lie. The military dosimeters then in use by our armed forces were designed to measure the radioactive background, not individual products. This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war.

We’ve had lies like that over here too. A whole bunch of them.

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one’s ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there’s no fairness on earth.

With any luck then it’s all God’s will.

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl. He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn’t believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. She should at least have fingers.

Anyone here doubt it’s a true story?

My husband, a man with a university degree, an engineer, seriously tried to convince me that it was an act of terrorism. An enemy diversion. A lot of people at the time thought that. But I remembered how I’d once been on a train with a man who worked in construction who told me about the building of the Smolensk nuclear plant: how much cement, boards, nails, and sand was stolen from the construction site and sold to neighboring villages. In exchange for money, for a bottle of vodka.

Of course with Putin now in power that’s all in the past.

[b]Robert Musil

I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.[/b]

Now that’s clever.

For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one’s actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly responsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.

Sure, in theory.

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.

Yeah, on the good days.

Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought.

But not you, right, Mr. Objectivist?

Youth’s scorn and its revolt against the established order, youth’s readiness for everything that is heroic, whether it is self-sacrifice or crime, its fiery seriousness and its unsteadiness—all this is nothing but its fluttering attempts to fly.

Worse: The fucking Kids.

What’s the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.

Duck!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"It is likely that unlikely things should happen” Aristotle[/b]

Some, in fact, will practically guarantee it.

“Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.” Plato

See also sophistry.

“You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.” Elias Canetti

Yeah, I once believed that myself.

“The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind” Elias Canetti

Our names, of course, not theirs.

"Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.” Elias Canetti

Damn straight!

"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.” W.B. Yeats

Here? Let’s name names.

[b]Nathanael West

Numbers constitute the only universal language.[/b]

So far anyway.

He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.

But only making it worse as often as not.

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

Nothing not postmodern about this, right?

He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.

A bit over the top, sure, but point taken.

He’s an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden.

Me too. Only now it’s more in the way of a jungle.

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

I’m still working on that, he thought.

[b]Nora Ephron

Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.[/b]

Is this really as ridiculous as it sounds?

I’m saying that the right man for you might be out there right now and if you don’t grab him, someone else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that someone else is married to your husband.

Is this really as ridiculous as it sounds?

I’ll have what she’s having.

Anyone recall what that actually was?

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

And then one day out of the blue the bottom just falls out.

The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.

In other words they become actual Celebrities!

We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.

Trust me: You don’t quite believe it less and less and less.

[b]tiny nietzsche

tragedy plus tragedy equals more fucking tragedy[/b]

Go ahead, do the math.

classically trained nihilist

Me? Not even close.

is that existential despair in your pocket or are you just anxious to see me?

Me? Mine bulges too.

kids, don’t do postmodernism

Indeed, dare to say no!

only motherfuckers left alive

What say you, Mr. Reasonable? :wink:

the girl with the deconstructionism tattoo

In the shape of a dragon no less.

[b]Han Kang

The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.[/b]

That was me once. One and then the other.

I don’t know you, she muttered, tightening her grip on the receiver, which she’d hung back in the cradle but was still clutching. So there’s no need for us to forgive each other. Because I don’t know you.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.

And here of course any mirror will do.

Now and then, all of this struck me as being not so much ridiculous as faintly ominous. What if, by chance, these early-stage symptoms didn’t pass? If the hints at hysteria, delusion, weak nerves and so on, that I thought I could detect in what she said, ended up leading to something more?

What if, by chance, she’s right? This time, in other words.

We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.

Or they will make you realize something altogether different. And there are almost always a lot – a hell of a lot – more of them.

A soul doesn’t have a body, so how can it be watching us?

It just can!!!

[b]Erica Jong

Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.[/b]

Pitch black for some of us.

I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back…

Let’s not go there, he thought.

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.

A hell of a lot harder for some.

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

Come on, it’s almost never really that cut and dry.

Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.

Okay, show me.

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy’s encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

Now that’s what I call a multiple orgasm.

[b]so sad today

shhh, listen, it’s the sound of everything getting stupider[/b]

Gee, I wonder who is responsible for that, Don?

we could wait for death together

Of course we all do anyway.

it’s not my fault i was born: the musical

Let’s imagine the soundtrack.

america needs a punch in the dick

Not unlike North Korea.

some of us have minds that move way too fast for this planet

Right, like that gets noticed.

staying alive is a lot of fucking pressure

Even when you still want to.

[b]Henri Bergson

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.[/b]

Obviously: more or less.

Darwin’s theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality.

You know where this takes me: contingency, chance and change.

It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That’s the objection. It is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has been precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists.

In other words, whatever that means.
Still, no doubt about it: point taken.

…the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.

Not that anyone ever really does. At least not to the satisfaction of everyone else.

It is impossible to consider the mechanism of our intellect and the progress of our science without arriving at the conclusion that between intellect and matter there is, in fact, symmetry, concord and agreement. On one hand, matter resolves itself more and more, in the eyes of the scholar, into mathematical relations, and on the other hand, the essential faculties of our intellect function with an absolute precision only when they are applied to geometry.

And, now, moving on to ethics…

We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

Considerably. But only regarding the parts that matter most.

[

[b]Nikolai A. Berdyaev

And when there are no more classes, when society is socially democratized and unified, then there will be revealed in all its metaphysical depths the never-ending tragedy of the conflict between personality and society.[/b]

My advice: Don’t hold your breath.

The war educated a generation of believers in force. The demons of hatred and murder then released continue their activity.

Is that still going on?

Control and violence that is best reflected in the state, are evil in themselves. In this knowledge lies the great truth of anarchism.

Theoretically for example.

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.

You know, if we let it.

Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism.

Not counting you, right, Mr. Objectivist?

It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.

Making him all that more dangerous perhaps.

]

[b]Neil Gaiman

It’s certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That’s what it means to be an American. That’s the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.[/b]

Good luck with that, right?

I sometimes imagine I would like my ashes to be scattered in a library. But then the librarians would just have to come in early the next morning to sweep them up again, before the people got there.

What the fuck, do it anyway.

The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself–his clothes, his manner, his carriage–as a grand joke.

He may just as well have gotten that from me. Now ask me who I got it from.

To be a good writer… read a lot and write every day.

For starters I’m guessing.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Wow, is that depressing or what.

I’d love to write some porn, but I don’t know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.

Of course it goes without saying that some aren’t bothered by this at all.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Unless of course you just make something up.

“Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.” Günter Grass

Imagine then if it were the other way around?

“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.” Günter Grass

Of course look where that got him.

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” Honoré de Balzac

Okay, I’m telling you.

"'The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.” Michel Foucault

That and the responsibilities.

“The world is my idea” Arthur Schopenhauer

Well, not counting all the parts that aren’t.