a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Philosophy 101: Being, Meaning, The Infinite Joy of Thought
Philosophy 201: Nothingness, Nonsense, The Infinite Pain of Thought
Philosophy 301: Does this class countv towards my business major?[/b]

Philosophy 401: The stuff we do here?

Above all a philosopher must be willing to work with
Plato: universals
Leibniz: infinitesimals
Kierkegaard: seemingly lost causes
Nietzsche: forces beyond her control
Sartre: methamphetamine

Different folks, different strokes?

Life is
Kierkegaard: anxiety
Schopenhauer: despair
Bataille: terror
Benjamin: guilt
Beckett: all that stuff, but really, really funny

On the other hand, is he laughing now?

We would set you free but
Sade: you love your chains
Lacan: you love your masters
Bataille: there is no we
Beckett: there is no you
Camus: there is no free

Obviously: Sade

Wilde: Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians
Sartre: In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team
Camus: All I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe to football

Obviously: Sartre

[b]Worst Philosophers of All Time
20. It’s
19. Absurd
18. To
17. Rank
16. Philosophers
15. As
14. If
13. They
12. Were
11. Films
10. Or
9. Light
8. Beers
7. Rather
6. Than
5. Our
4. Bravest
3. Conceptual
2. Warriors

1. Ayn Rand[/b]

Finally, one thing we can all agree on.

[b]Elias Canetti

I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violincello like him, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life.[/b]

Sort of like me here, right? Though probably not even close.

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

Maybe, but that’s not nothing in this world.

Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?

My guess: We all know.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count. Not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body.

How fucking idiotic is that, he thought!!

Nothing among all human emotions is more beautiful and more hopeless than the wish to be loved for oneself alone.

As you might guess, that has never been a problem for me.

His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.

No, really, for some of us this is almost true.

[b]Günter Grass

Once upon a time there was a musician who slew his four cats, stuffed them in a garbage can, left the building, and went to visit friends.[/b]

Of course once upon a time nothing much hasn’t happened.

We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn’t God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.

In novels of course you can say things like this.

Behind all sorrows in the world Klepp saw a ravenous hunger; all human suffering, he believed, could be cured with a portion of blood sausage. What quantities of fresh blood sausage with rings of onion, washed down with beer, Oskar consumed in order to make his friend think his sorrow’s name was hunger and not Sister Dorothy.

On the other hand, just the words “blood sausage” give some of us the creeps.

We struck up a conversation, but took pains to keep to small talk at first. We touched on the most trivial of topics: I asked if he thought the fate of man was unalterable. He thought it was.

So, is that small enough for you?

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem.

You meaning not us I suspect.

You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!

He figured it must be the other American intellectuals.

[b]Existential Comics

Never trust someone who says they are seeking the good of all humanity, but are nasty to every single human they meet.[/b]

Not many folks [on the left] that doesn’t include.

Should we teach philosophy before college? The answer is obvious if you state the opposite, and substitute the definition in for “philosophy”:
“We should NOT teach kids to question our fundamental beliefs.”
“We should NOT teach kids about logic, ethics, and knowledge.”

He wondered, “Why can’t I make sense of this?”

My main problem with Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason is that it just isn’t very funny.

My guess: It wasn’t meant to be.

Amazon’s major innovation was bringing sweatshops back to America.

Yeah, but that’s already old news. returntonow.net/2018/02/03/amaz … sweatshop/

Philosophical thought experiment: imagine a “Twin Earth” where everything was the same, except there were hot local singles in your area looking to hook up.

Not counting Baltimore of course.

Here’s the litmus test: until middle aged suburban wine moms can no longer call someone up because their Mexican waiter was rude to them, and have federal agents show up demanding their papers like god damn fascists, we haven’t abolished ICE.

In other words, when Hell freezes over.

[b]Neil Gaiman

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.[/b]

1] is this true
2] if so, why does it matter?

I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive, he said. The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don’t remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.

Hear! Hear!

Change. Change. Change. Change … change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

[i]Or:
Dasein. Dasein. Dasein. Dasein…Dasein. Dasein. Dasssein. When you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

How’d this go for you?[/i]

Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.

Never needed rain for that, he thought. Let alone in the graveyard.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.

Why stop there? If you get my drift.

I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the winds of the evil and the wicked. Or just anybody that I don’t like.

After all, who’s gonna stop him?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

For all we live to know is known.[/b]

Possibly excepting all that we don’t.

There are two bodies — the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death,” is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

Now all that’s left is to prove it.

…but it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal.

If only for all practical purposes.

I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well.

Anyone here have it on tape?

It was well said of a certain German book that er lasst sich nicht lesen—it does not permit itself to be read.

“Sprechen sie deutsch, baby?”

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss — saying unto it "thus far, and no farther!”

Well, that’s what it would probably say no doubt.