a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Anthony Powell

Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.[/b]

Let’s pin down why that is.

In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.

Let’s pin down why that is.

There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.

Never been myself but I don’t doubt it.

His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.

I won’t point to you if you don’t point to me.

Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.

Or, sure, it just seems that way.

It doesn’t do to read too much, Widmerpool said.You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

Cue for example the best seller list.

[b]C.G. Jung

Funnily enough, “self-criticism” is an idea much in vogue in Marxist countries, but there it is subordinated to ideological considerations and must serve the State, and not truth and justice in men’s dealing with one another. The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.[/b]

Spot the irony?

Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

Impressions. Really, what to make of them?

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!

Among others [here], he means me.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Unless of course you discern God.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.

Let’s apply this to, say, the Trump administration.

If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.

Let’s apply this to, say, the Trump administration.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place.[/b]

The idle rich in particular.

She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn’t have to do anything more.

We should all be that lucky.

Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.

Tell that to the folks at, say, Sotheby.

But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn’t all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn’t have been the real thing.

Too many to count he thought.

Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

Why on earth would you want them to?

After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor’s snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.

Let’s weep for their future.

[b]so sad today

likes: death
dislikes: dying[/b]

Not very realistic is it? But point taken.

ok, here’s the thing, you have to rescue me from myself

I’ll give it a go.

me: fuck authority
also me: can someone just tell me what to do

Perfectly normal, isn’t it?

if i sound depressed it’s because i am

Yep, that’ll do it.

twitter is a dark, cruel, reactionary, disembodied, serotonin-chasing, polarizing, punishing pit of snakes & it’s so much better than instagram

Someone explain this please.

too anxious to sit still, too depressed to move

That can’t be good.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

Maybe she had “no more books left inside her,” as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.[/b]

Better that than ''no books inside you at all".

Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposed to have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.

Right, like there really is nothing new under the sun.

When do I stop? When I’m tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something before you give it up forever.

Let’s name the folks here who should give it up forever.

You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.

And then every once in a while the talented husbands of powerful women.

I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I’ve brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It’s like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It’s a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that’s not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here’s a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That’s incredibly moving to me.

Of course nowadays most of what see on the news is fiction.

Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say.

You know, when that matters.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.[/b]

That or desparate.

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Religion in a nutshell?

Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religions, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.

Of course that’s not how they see it.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Cue all the cronies in Washington.

Apologize: To lay the foundation for a future offence.

Repeat as necessarry.

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.

Sure, I might be one of them.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Words deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.[/b]

Of course others can nudge it right back again.

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at ‘meretrix’, a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. ‘Meretrix’! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn’t be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.

On the other hand, one way or another, everything comes down to that. Eventually.

Real data is messy…It’s all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it’s playing your song, but unfortunately it’s out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk.

Not only that but who’s to say how real?

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don’t know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Sure, if that actually works for you.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Okay but less trivial sometimes than others.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

So, how dumb is that?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another. Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness![/b]

Go ahead, see if you can describe it better.

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

Nope, don’t remember it that way at all.

It was like something lurking in the darkness within him…There it remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.

Then a kind of swooshing back and forth.

She knew she would die like an early, colourless, scentless flower that the end of the winter puts forth mercilessly.

Now that’s grim.

Art-speech is the only truth.

Unless, of course, that’s a lie.

The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis’ heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitchgoddess Success also, if only she would have him.

Fuck her has always been my own reaction.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.” Martin Heidegger[/b]

Well, maybe sometimes.

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” Martin Heidegger

Let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

“Nature has no history.” Martin Heidegger

Let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have." Jean-Paul Sartre

For some of course how grim is that.

“Life begins on the other side of despair.” Jean-Paul Sartre

You know, if you can get there.

"It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” Gabriel García Márquez

Enough for him maybe.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

No one had taught us what freedom means. We’d only ever learned how to die for freedom.[/b]

My guess: The State’s rendition.

No one knows what’s in the other world. It’s better here. More familiar.

The devil we know best and all that crap.

According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn’t count toward your lifespan because you’re drinking wine and enjoying yourself.

Come on, he thought, what do they know?

“He’s going to die.” I understood later on that you can’t think that way. I cried in the bathroom. None of the mothers cry in the hospital rooms. They cry in the toilets, the baths. I come back cheerful: “Your cheeks are red. You’re getting better.” “Mom, take me out of the hospital. I’m going to die here. Everyone here dies.” Now where am I going to cry? In the bathroom? There’s a line for the bathroom—everyone like me is in that line.

They endure it. Though, for some, they pray to God.

He knew that in order to survive, you only needed three things: bread, onions, and soap.

Well, that and water.

At first, the question was, Who’s to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do?

And then: What are our options?

[b]Nathanael West

Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.[/b]

In other words, her lies.

Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the débris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.

Of course you still have to be good at it.

He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.

Mine would rock it too.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one–like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail–making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.

Scripted in other words. A character.

But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.

Probably not a good thing. But maybe it is.

I’m going to be a star some day, she announced as though daring him to contradict her.
I’m sure you…
It’s my life. It’s the only thing in the whole world that I want.
It’s good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
but…
If I’m not, I’ll commit suicide.

Probably already has.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

In any event, it’s too late for him.

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately." Seneca

And that narrows it down to…what exactly?

“Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.” Honoré de Balzac

I know that mine do.

“Questioning is the piety of thought.” Martin Heidegger

Answering is the piety of Nazis.

“We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.” Martin Heidegger

Well, maybe sometimes.

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” Martin Heidegger

Let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

[b]Nora Ephron

So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained not just in society but in literature. The women’s movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don’t know if it can clean up the mess in our minds.[/b]

Let’s just say that it hasn’t so far.

I must try this again, I thought; I must try again someday to sit still and not say a word. Maybe when I’m dead.

It’s got to be a lot easier then.

You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.

Five will get you ten he’s thinking much the same thing.

It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly believe that you are living at the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.

You know, if you’re an objectivist. Though sure one suspects even if you’re not.

You’d be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.

By then though what difference does it make?

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

Some women [like some men] more than others.

[b]Erica Jong

Someday every woman will have orgasms—ike every family has color TV—and we can all get on with the business of life. [/b]

Okay, so what are the latest stats?

Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.

She means you, asshole.

I have lived my life according to this principle: If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it.

Or pencil it on the calendar somewhere.

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Nope, no way, not all the time.

We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called monogamy. That’s called civilization and its discontents.

Or, sure, you might call it something else.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

Most of us though will take our chances with it.

[b]so sad today

everything happens for a stupid reason[/b]

Either that or a really stupid reason.

mood: abandoned building

Mine: abandoned building demolished.

she died as she lived: feeling like she was about to die

Not to worry, I’m working on it.

i am anxiety

And then one day: i [b]AM[/b] anxiety

in a threesome with fear of death and fear of life

And they’re on top.

ever just feel like you don’t have a right to exist for your entire life

Clearly not rhetorical.

[b]Elias Canetti

Relearn astonishment.[/b]

Unless of course you’re a newbie.

All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Or in what some call nightmares.

There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.

Do you get this?

I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.

I’ll assume that he is joking if you will.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

One of us, one of them.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

Point taken, however idiotic.

[b]Günter Grass

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.[/b]

Mein Kampf?

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

Sounds more or less ominous to me.

You are vain and wicked—as a genius should be.

Any vain and wicked genuises here?

Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.

Takes years of practice for some.

…I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters.

Around me though that’s perfectly normal.

After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and – above all – its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything – and everyone – is fair game.

He means state capitalism of course.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.[/b]

Has the last one closed yet?

All we have to believe is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted.

When they lie to us he means.

This little piggy went to Hades
This little piggy stayed home
This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh
This little piggy violated virgins
And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to get to the top

Try this one on your kids.

Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald’s. I didn’t think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald’s.

There are three within walking distance of me. Seriously.

Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you’d answer for your evil deeds and your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls
He must have eaten a lot of people.
Not as many as you’d think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had better be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby…

See? As with most things it all depends.

Furthermore, it goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.

I’d still ask him to prove it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.’” Eduardo Galeano[/b]

You know, when it’s not actually repeating itself.

“Nature has no history.” Martin Heidegger

In other words, nothing is ever actually written down. Still, let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

“The most important consequence of self-sufficiency is freedom.” Epicurus

You either learn that [and live that] or you don’t.

“Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.” Epicurus

How logical is that?

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.” Epicurus

Of course no one can actually do this.

“You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough.” William Blake

On the other hand, enough [or more than enough] what?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

If you are ever drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations.[/b]

More to the point, what prompted him to suggest this?

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture —a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually –I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Based on a true story perhaps?

That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

One word: cremation.

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.

Let’s narrow this truth down here.

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.

I used to be curious about that too.

Actually, I do have doubts, all the time. Any thinking person does. There are so many sides to every question.

In particular those beastly conflicting goods.