a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

Today I wear these chains, and am here. Tomorrow I shall be fetterless! But where?[/b]

You know, if it even matters where.

Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In forever knowing, we are forever blessed; but to know all, were the curse of a fiend.

Well, it’s a good thing we never can.

And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into recesses if his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

Wow, he thought, he could be talking about me.

The result of law inviolate is perfection–right–negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain.

Let’s exchange misunderstandings of what this means.

For passion must, with youth, expire.

Yes, even among those for whom it is wasted.

Where was your all-loving god when he was really needed?

He just doesn’t get God, does he?

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive.[/b]

Not all that far removed then from the unreal reality.

Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.

And, believe it or not, not just the assholes.

People with packs are people with purpose.

Of course as we all know that can go either way.

Even calling Borne a “he” began to feel faintly ridiculous as he didn’t exhibit the aggression or self-absorption I expected from most males.

Call him “it” then.

Soon after, there comes the crunch of boots, and, disoriented, you shout, ‘Annihilation! Annihilation!’

Black boots in particular.

Among all the impossible things he had already witnessed, what were a few more?

First, of course, define “impossible”.

[b]Existential Comics

Yeah, but when is it going to be socially acceptable to punch a nihilist?[/b]

When has it never not been? Or, rather, the equivalent of that here.

One secret that debate champions don’t want you to know is that you can actually win any debate by shouting “Ad Hominem!” over and over and over again.

Want me to name names?

Nihilism appeals to young people because it is the only way to be smugly superior without having to actually learn or do anything.

You know, all the other nihilists.

Memes are communist because they are entirely public, and the creator of the meme, if they are known at all, has no more say in how it is used than anyone else. No one owns a meme, comrade.

No counting those who pay others to invent them.

Philosophy is love of wisdom
Literature is love of life
Art is love of beauty
Science is love of trying to categorize every single thing like a god damn nerd

Is Einstein still the only exception here?

Science: this is how it is
Philosophy: is it though?
Literature: imagine if it weren’t.
Religion: never!

It’s in the Bible.

[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]

Okay, sure, it takes some longer than others to actually figure that all out.

The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him; on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life and on the other, a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire… there are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

Lucky I was never an artist then.

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable-perhaps everything.

And, no doubt about it, the more objective it is the better.

The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice.

It thumps you is what it does.

, too, lived—which I had not done before, and which I could still do. I lived into the depths, and the depths began to speak. The depths taught me the other truth. It thus united sense and nonsense in me. I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf, completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: “I am the servant of a child.” Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need.

It thumps you is what it does.

There is no other way open to us; we are forced to resort to decisions and solutions where we formerly trusted ourselves to natural happenings. Every problem, therefore, brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness-but also the necessity of saying good-bye to childlike unconsciousness and trust in nature.

Someone pass this along to Satyr.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays, you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days.[/b]

Anyone here still have an extraordinary point?

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

That’s why you’re here for me, right?

Of course, if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which…

Let’s decide:
1] too cynical?
2] not cynical enough?

I am a fool, said Richard Lovat, which was the most frequent discovery he made. It came, moreover, every time with a new shock of surprise and chagrin. Every time he climbed a new mountain range and looked over, he saw, not only a new world, but a big anticipatory fool on this side of it, namely, himself.

Let’s decide:
1] too cynical?
2] not cynical enough?

Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them… But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.

So, how does your God measure up?

[b]Delivered helpless and amazed
From the womb of the All, I am waiting dazed
For memory to be erased.

Then I shall know the Elysium
That lies outside the monstrous womb
Of time from out of which I come.[/b]

The womb of All. Nice touch.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Numbers have a way of taking a man by the hand and leading him down the path of reason.” Pythagoras[/b]

We’ll need to see the numbers first, of course.

“The highest goal of music is to connect one’s soul to their Divine Nature, not entertainment.” Pythagoras

Never tried that before. But not without good reason.

“Educate the children and it won’t be necessary to punish the men.” Pythagoras

If only in theory.

“Man cannot endure his littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” Ernest Becker

Still, some of us are doing the best we can.

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself”. Jean-Paul Sartre

Wow, that can’t be good.

“The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.” Anton Chekhov

Wow, that can’t be good.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

Old enough to remember the arrival of ‘Have a nice day’, Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of ‘Have a great one’. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? ‘You have a profound and meaningful day now.’[/b]

Let’s keep that one going.

They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don’t need to promise.

Let’s not drift apart here, okay?

An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

Two words: Don Trump.

Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires.

Either way the shrinks get rich.

Something had happened and he, like almost everyone else, had got used to the habit of life. Perhaps that’s all life was: a habit that resisted the adventure of death.

How big a stretch is that? Point taken though.

If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

Of course not everyone will agree.

[b]Tom Stoppard

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.[/b]

When, in fact, in some quarters, it is really a convention of assholes.

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices— after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s.
Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special.
But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do?!
Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.
But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act.
Act natural. You know why you’re here at least.
We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true.
For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. it’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored.

Hey, if the shoe fits, right?

Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes.

On the other hand, why fifty-five?

Well, he is mortal, death comes to us all, etcetera, and consequently he would have died anyways, sooner or later. Or to look at it from the social point of view - he’s just one man among many, the loss would be well within reason and convenience.

And who isn’t that applicable to?

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Not to mention the other way around.

Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.

Of course now it’s all zeros and ones.

[b]God

Once you’re dead that’s it.[/b]

Cue Nietzsche.

If anyone asks I’m Canadian.

Wow, that’s right across the border!

All men are created equal – A man who own 600 other men

This dude came close: “When George Washington was eleven years old, he inherited ten slaves; by the time of his death, 317 slaves lived at Mount Vernon, including 123 owned by Washington, 40 leased from a neighbor, and an additional 153 dower slaves.”

I am joining the Golden State Warriors.

Look out Lakers!

Admission to Heaven is determined by aggregate number of yellow cards.

Every four years as it were.

In a unanimous 1-0 ruling I have just found that the Supreme Court is going to Hell.

You know, if there is one.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

If anyone got indignant and wanted to take the coffin back home, they were told that the dead were now, you know, heroes, and that they no longer belonged to their families. They were heroes of the State. They belonged to the State.[/b]

The fucking State again! Though not ours of course. Well, not yet.

Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I’d never heard those words before.

Still, sooner or later, there’s really not much that you won’t hear.

People aren’t heroes. We’re all peddlers of the apocalypse. Big and small.

Someone’s been tripping on the Bible.

Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population.

Deliberately accidental?

Where are we going to get tens of thousands of dollars if my husband makes 120 dollars a month? One professor told us quietly: “With her pathologies, your child is of great interest to science. You should write to hospitals in other countries. They should be interested.”

Of course it’s a true story.

I’m a product of my time. I’m not a criminal.

Sure that might work.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

What if she’d turned down the lightly flung invitation and went about her life, thudding obliviously along like a drunk person, a blind person, a moron, someone who thinks that the small packet of happiness she carries is enough.[/b]

Well, it does work for some of us. I wonder then if that includes me.

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain.

Perhaps, but only if they let you.

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated.

Let’s skip the part about money. You know, this time.

She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she’s become this ordinary sort of boring person…I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don’t want that to happen to me.

Let’s not go there, he thought.

Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you.

Hell, you may even profit from it.

And it was true that if you categorized people by which Disney character they were, then Jonah would always be Bambi. Motherless, graceful, unobtrusive. Ethan–Jiminy Cricket, the annoying little conscience… just look at Ash. In the Disney hierarchy she was Snow White… He paused to wonder which Disney character Jules was, and realized that Disney did not make women or girls or woodland animals that were like her.

Which one do I remind you of?

[b]The Dead Author

The most successful people I’ve met sleep less the closer they get to death.[/b]

Nope, no can do. No sleep, no dreams.

Just because hope dies last doesn’t mean it won’t die.

Nothing doesn’t die.

What should we do?
Aristotle: Be good
Kant: Do good.
Mill: A good
Nietzsche: No good

It’s not even close, right?

Good that German philosophy is all about not giving in to despair.

Someone explain this please.

You need to change yourself if you want to change the world, but in order to change yourself, you first have to change the world.

Haven’t thought of that in over twenty years.

On this day in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre started to die, By being born.

Actually, that started on the day he was conceived.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.[/b]

Go figure.

Fidelity, n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

Go figure.

Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

Their sins in other words.

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

If only in an entirely determined universe.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

But even here we only think that’s true.

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

And, no, not just the objectivists.

[b]Anthony Powell

Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?
I don’t know, said Moreland. Love means such different things to different people.[/b]

Finally, a definitive answer to what love is!

Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward—in contrast with love—is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.

Finally, a definitive answer to what friendship is!

In fact, she seemed to prefer ‘older men’ on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely.

Some of us are even able to take a certain kind of pride in that.

We took a bus to Victoria, then passed on foot into a vast, desolate region of stucco streets and squares upon which a doom seemed to have fallen. The gloom was cosmic.

By way of Baltimore for example.

Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink.

Like you can’t have both.

Reason is given to all men, but all men do not know how to use it. Liberty is offered to each one of us, but few learn to be free. Such gifts are, in any case, a right to be earned, not a privilege for the shiftless.

Unless of course you can just throw money at it.

[b]Sad Socrates

I’m so tired of knowing that I know nothing.[/b]

Well, at least he knows that.

I want to die over and over and over again.

Sure, be the first.

I hope we’re alone in the universe. One civilization is enough for me.

In fact, you might call it one too many.

I tell myself five times a day that “God isn’t real.”

Try six times.

If you can’t laugh at death, you face a greater tragedy than dying.

What the hell does that mean? If anything at all.

What this world does to people, people do worse to each other.

Right, like there are no possible exceptions. You know, if there actually are.

[b]Temple Grandin

If I could snap my fingers and be nonautistic, I would not. Autism is part of what I am.[/b]

How crazy is that? As some might note.

But my favorite of Einstein’s words on religion is “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life’s great questions.

You know, in the either/or world.

I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.

And what might that be?

Animals make us Human.

Imagine then trying to convince them of this.

The only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.

For some, this actually puts death in perspective. Hell, even their own.

Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.

Tell that to the fools at Peta.

[b]Nora Ephron

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.[/b]

Unless of course you’re looking for touble.

Death doesn’t really feel eventual or inevitable. It still feels avoidable somehow. But it’s not. 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.

Unless of course you go looking to die.

Black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.

That and denim.

One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.

Anything? Come on, is this really true?

People who are drawn to journalism are usually people who, because of their cynicism or emotional detachment or reserve or whatever, are incapable of being anything but witnesses to events. Something prevents them from becoming involved, committed, and allows them to remain separate.

Of course here you don’t actually have to be a journalist. At least I’m not.

He loved Thelma, Jonathan said, he had never loved anyone but Thelma, he had loved Thelma for nineteen years and would always love her even though Thelma didn’t give a rat’s ass about him and never had.

Claudia is what I call her.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastophe”. H.G. Wells[/b]

But only until Don Trump drains the swamp.

“Wisdom has its excesses and has no less need of moderation than folly”. Alfred North Whitehead

For example, when they start in on shoving it down your throat.

“How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.” Salman Rushdie

Indeed, why on earth would anyone be terrorized in today’s world?

“Why look for conspiracy when stupidity can explain so much.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It sure explains a lot for me.

“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Not that anyone actually does these days.

“What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte

You think?

[b]Erica Jong

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.[/b]

Well, maybe one or two.

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

No, the trouble is that no one really knows where to draw the fucking line.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

If friend is the right word.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare.

Still, he probably had a pretty good idea.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.

Any of them here?

I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book ‘proving’ that Tom Jones was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book ‘proving’ that Tom Jones was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book ‘proving’ that Tom Jones was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading Tom Jones as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.

And then there’s Engelbert Humperdinck.

[b]Nathanael West

Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, and they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.[/b]

Now that’s a fucking insight!

He was giving birth to groups of words.

Worse, words meant only to define and to defend other words.

She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.

Works that way when he isn’t hard-boiled either.

His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck’s eggs from a chicken’s rectum.

It actually doesn’t matter what it means; you either get it or you don’t.

It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.

Of course no one ever did.

We must take the long view—every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.

Of course that can stretch all the way out to the beginning of time.