a thread for mundane ironists

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.[/b]

Of course we [and Alison Kelly] know better.

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

My guess: Men calculate this one way, women another.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

The novel is full of stuff like this.

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

Anyone here know if that’s true?

I suppose I’d had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn’t ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My ‘technique’ was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

Of course I know why that never worked for me.

He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.

Never been there myself. Never even wanted to.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.[/b]

Or not of course.

There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

Let’s name some.

He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it.

Well, maybe a few times.

As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south.

The south being the north too.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

Great, just what we need, another optimist.

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. … Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

What do you suppose the next one will be?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Logic: A = A
Ethics: A is good
Aesthetics: A is beautiful
Epistemology: I know A
Psychology: I like A
Politics: I rule A
Literature: I vaguely remember losing A[/b]

Next up: B

Things You Should Never Assume
Descartes: that you exist
Kant: that you are free
Hegel: that you can think
Nietzsche: that you can act
Sartre: that you can love
Beckett: that you didn’t die before you were born

Next up: Things You Should Always Assume.

Idealism: I drink to remember
Realism: I drink to forget
Materialism: I drink therefore I am

Or, for that matter, smoke dope.

Don’t hate the signifier, hate the signified.

Or, sure, both.

Philosophy 101: Being is becoming
Philosophy 201: Becoming is nothing
Philosophy 301: Nothing is a virtual something
Philosophy 401: How did this become a comp lit seminar?

Blame it on the existentialists no doubt.

History is written
Germany: by the victors
Britain: by the Germans
France: by the British
Russia: in blood
Italy: in stone
United States: in crayon

Crayon, sure. And in big block capital letters.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.[/b]

Not only that but you don’t even need a mirror.

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.

And historically that could be anywhere around the globe.

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word. At least that’s one way I’ve figured out how to describe love.

I once thought this was possible for me.
For about fifteen minutes.

…nothing is more precious than independence and freedom…

And not just up in the clouds here.

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn’t come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn’t taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said, Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

Sure, if you can.

Isn’t that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear?

What does this remind you of, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]Neil Gaiman

If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?[/b]

Uh, sometimes?

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

He wondered: Could that possibly be applicable in turn to what we do here?

I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last.

Not only that but all of the “stuff” that you are now came from stars, will return to stars.
You know, for whatever that’s worth.

Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.

So, is that more before or more after we get to the part we call philosophy?

The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.

Or you can focus more instead on how much it fetches at the auction.

You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?
I dabble, she said.
Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern.

In America of course almost no one says they dabble.

[b]Existential Comics

Guide to help understand American foreign policy:
Freedom = American business interest.
Democracy = American business interest.
Peace = killing everyone against American business interest.
Civilized society = white people.[/b]

And, no, not just in Trumpworld.

I love it when biologists or neurologists think they’ve disproven free will. We’ve been operating under the assumption that the physical universe is deterministic since Democritus. Being able to see where the synapses fire in the brain changes absolutely nothing about the debate.

Except that it may well end up changing everything.

[b]How to improve your critical thinking skills:

1. Question everything.
2. Read a broad array of sources.
3. Challenge your own biases first.
4. Don’t accept easy answers.
5. Always remember that Karl Marx was right about everything.[/b]

Let’s pin down who was really right about everything.

Existentialists don’t want to admit it, but Zinedine Zidane headbutting that guy in the World Cup final was the most pure expression of authentic existential freedom to ever occur in history.

You tell me: youtu.be/vF4iWIE77Ts
Personally, I’m not convinced.

Why is it that when I shop for fruit there is like banana, pineapple, strawberry, mango, orange, and then 200 specific patented versions of apples.

Yeah, what the fuck is going on here?

The question is, does the set of all sets that do not contain sets which contain sets that don’t cause logical paradoxes contain a set which doesn’t not cause a paradox or not?

Clearly: Maybe.

[b]Dave Eggers,

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.[/b]

And, with any luck, you never come back.

Still though, I think if you’re not self-obsessed, you’re probably boring.

Nope, never been that. The latter, I mean.

All I ever wanted was to know what to do.

And not just philosophically, he added.

We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.

Not only that but we never get them back again.

You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.

If only for 70 odd years.

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.

You know, for those who actually want to.

[b]C. G. Jung

They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.[/b]

Like my myths here, right?

Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. “Freedom” is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion.

And who really knows where one ends and the other begins.

It is not that present-day man is capable of greater evil than the man of antiquity or the primitive. He merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his propensity to evil.

Chief among them being this: insisting that [instead] it is for the greater good.

To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey — light on a dark background or dark on light.

Don’t expect many to agree.

And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of his shadow side, so the normal individual, like the neurotic, sees his shadow in his neighbour or in the man beyond the great divide.

Me and my shadow walk into a bar…

In contrast to the subjectivism of the conscious mind the unconscious is objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses and dreams, none of which one makes oneself but which come upon one objectively.

And not just in a wholly determined universe.

[b]so sad today

sleeping all day speaks louder than words[/b]

Deafening at times.

i eat existential dread for breakfast

Of course she’s probably bulimic.

if you like death you’ll love me

Hell, he thought, I’m rather obsessed with it myself.

anxiety or it didn’t happen

Depression if it happens again.

for every one hour i spend with people it takes me four to recover

And them with you.

i’m basically just a nap waiting to happen

Or [on some days] a corpse.

[b]D H Lawrence

I have realized that my will, no matter how intelligent I am, is only another nuisance on the face of the earth, once I start exerting it. And other people’s wills are even worse.[/b]

And not just all that Nietzsche shit.

The hideousness {the author] sees is the reflection of himself, and of the automatic meat-lust with which he approaches another individual…Even the most “beautiful” woman is still a human creature. If {the author] approached her as such, as a being instead of as a piece of lurid meat, he would have no horrors afterwards.

Meat-lust. Sure, put it in perspective, but, still, there it is.

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

Especially those who grab 'em by the pussy.

She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual striking together they only destroyed each other.

Or, occasionally, he was the flint and she was the steel.

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society: or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.

And, for sure, we’ll see our fair share of that here.

…though it’s a shame, what’s been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labor-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. i’d wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. but since i can’t, an’ nobody can, i’d better hold my peace, an’ try an’ life my own life: if i’ve got one to live, which i rather doubt.

I can live with that, he thought.

[b]Paul Schrader

The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. [/b]

After all, you’ve earned it.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It’s absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

Call it, say, the Woody Allen Syndrome.

Because many of the films I’ve made have had an intellectual edge, it’s harder for me to lie. It’s harder for me to go to people with money and say I don’t care about art, all I care about isc ommerce; all I really want to do is make money.

Tee-hee?

Contradiction is the heart and soul of character and drama. You’re always looking for it. I loved her so much I hit her; that’s character. I loved her so much I hit her again; that’s even more character.

First, let’s run that by her.

There’s the generation that made the rules, the generation that codified them. The generation that broke them - that’s mine. The generation that laughed at them - that’s Tarantino’s. And now there’s a generation that doesn’t know that there were any.

Not quite anything goes and not quite everything goes.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

Just not in Hollywood.

[b]tiny nietzsche

you can’t spell sunday without sad[/b]

And don’t try it with tuesday, wednesday, thursday or saturday either.

sometimes when I see mars low in the sky, I can’t help but think how elon musk is a dick

Who needs Mars for that, he thought.

voids will be voids

And then some for mine.

me: I feel disconnected
doktor: have you tried reality?
me: does it hurt?
doktor: all the time

Actually, only until you die.

fuck. I woke up again

Not only that but it’s getting to be a habit.

a group of time travelers is called a probably

He means probably not of course.

[b]David Sedaris

To put [undecided voters] in perspective, I think​ of being​ on an airplane.​ The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle​ with her food cart and, eventually,​ parks​ it beside my seat.​ “Can I inter​est you in the chick​en?​” she asks.​ “Or would​ you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broke​n glass​ in it?”

To be undecided in this elect​ion is to pause​ for a moment and then ask how the chick​en is cooked.[/b]

He means the next election too.

When asked “What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

I’ve always preferred crostics myself.

I’m the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I’ve never even met.

Never even came close myself. But that’s their problem.

Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.

Doesn’t surprise me.

It’s just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.

We’ll need a context of course.

This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.

Hell, that might even be catch-44.

[b]Martin Scorsese

There’s no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.[/b]

What’s that make hard then?

More than ninety percent of directing a picture is the right casting.

And we know who that is.

Very often I’ve known people who wouldn’t say a word to each other, but they’d go to see movies together and experience life that way.

Define experience.

I love movies - it’s my whole life, and that’s it.

My guess: He really means it.

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.

Wow, who would have thought that.

Violence is not the answer, it doesn’t work any more. We are at the end of the worst century in which the greatest atrocities in the history of the world have occurred… The nature of human beings must change. We must cultivate love and compassion.

He snorted sarcastically.

[b]Hannah Arendt

I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.[/b]

In other words, some things never change.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Let’s start one then.

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

And [clearly] not just Eichmann and the banality of evil. At least not here.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.

So, what do you think, a bit more complicated than that?

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

On the other hand, you can fool most of the people some of the time.

…the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

In fact, all the centuries.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Napoleon[/b]

So, how am I doing so far?

“What people commonly call Fate is, as a general rule, nothing but their own stupid and foolish conduct.” Arthur Schopenhauer

It would have to be that, wouldn’t it?

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” Soren Kierkegaard

And, no, not just the objectivists.

"The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him."Arthur Schopenhauer

Indeed, they’ll tell you exactly what it is.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” Thomas Jefferson

So, no doubt, he kept them away from the slaves.

“Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?” Epicurus

Let’s file this one [yet again] under, “blah, blah, blah”.

[b]José Saramago

The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with God, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him.[/b]

Yeah, but He started it.

If you don’t write your books, nobody else will do it for you.

Trust me: That’s actually true.

…the habit of falling hardens the body, reaching the ground, to in itself, is a relief.

How high up being of particular importance here.

…sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn’t come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we’ve given up hope of it ever arriving, it’s likely then that we won’t know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.

All these fucking years, he thought, and I still don’t.

… that’s how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.

My advice: Don’t count on me.

When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf?

Seriously, would you sign it yourself?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

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

You know, if only that were actually true.

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Give or take a few of the punchlines.

“The world is everything that is the case.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Naturally as it were.

“On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.” Adam Smith

Sounds about right.

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” Soren Kierkegaard

Not to mention the one smack dab in the middle of oblivion.

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” Soren Kierkegaard

Right, like we can even know what that is.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Every loneliness is a pinnacle.[/b]

Unfortunately, I’m one of the very few who agree.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

Of course as she understood it integrity involved thinking exactly like she did. And without a smidgeon of irony.

The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrifice.

Unless of course that’s just natural.

Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man’s independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

Again the great irony here being that by its very nature capitalism thrives on the alienation of labor.

Why no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.

Again the great irony here being that all others must measure their own values against hers.

Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles?

Hell, I’m always imagining the imbeciles here smiling.

[b]Jessie Burton

In suffering we find our truest selves.[/b]

Oh, sure we do.

Pity, unlike hate, can be boxed and put away.

Never tried that before.

Growing older does not seem to make you more certain, Nella thinks. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.

Not only that but a lot less time to do something about it.

A lifetime isn’t enough to know how a person will behave.

My guess: A lifetime is all we’ll get.

When you have truly come to know a person, Nella – when you see beneath the sweeter gestures, the smiles – when you see the rage and the pitiful fear which each of us hide – then forgiveness is everything. We are all in desperate need of it.

He wondered if that included him.

My brother knows the danger of having nothing to do.

That and the power to do it.