a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Sad Socrates

I’m not saying I know, but I’m also saying you don’t know.[/b]

What? Damned near everything I figure.

It’s not true love until you feel nothing.

Or at least barely something.

Most things don’t make sense, they just make rational sense.

Let’s start with, oh, I don’t know, objectivism?

I’m so tired of having legitimate criticisms.

Steer clear of here then.

Sadness sells.

Not unlike happiness for that matter.

You can’t win.

Not only that but you can lose brutally.

[b]Colson Whitehead

It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he’d experienced it.[/b]

Better to just stay dead, right?

The only time “early bloomer” has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing.

Him and Woody Allen.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Maybe someday that will even make sense.

There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.

And of course take you with them.

This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

Hmm, I wonder what nation that is?

And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.

On purpose in other words.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.[/b]

Clearly more applicable to some than to others.

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.

On the other hand, there’s always manifest destiny.

These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.

Questions about suicide as likely as not.

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.

That’s why we won.

The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

We just forget what that is. Well, some of us.

Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful.

Sure, it might catch on again.

[b]The Dead Author

Kafka taught me that you can be a successful lawyer during your lifetime and a world-famous writer after your death, and people will still feel bad for you.[/b]

Anyone here still feel bad about him?

Remembering is just a more creative way of forgetting.

Well, it certainly can be.

So Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir walk into a bar. Smoking and drinking turn Sartre into a diabetic. He goes blind and is no longer able to write. De Beauvoir takes care of him for seven years until his death in 1980. There’s nothing funny about substance abuse.

Okay, but still not likely to stop me.
Why? Let’s just say I have my reasons.

Melancholia is for romantics, despair is for existentialists, but depression is for everyone.

Or eventually everyone.

German is easy because the word for ‘yes indeed’ (“allerdings”) is also the German word for ‘actually no’.

Like the word “cleave” over here.

Who should we read?
Shakespeare: Homer.
Goethe: Shakespeare.
Tolstoy: Goethe.
Joyce: Tolstoy.
Hemingway: Joyce.
De Beauvoir: Women.

See if you can spot the outlier here.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Perhaps this is the ultimate freedom, eh, Dreamlord? The freedom to leave.[/b]

Indeed, and who doesn’t cherish that here?

Mostly you are what they think you are.

Not to be confused with what you think they are.

Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say they’re scared for the fear to become real.

Other times though it actually takes something frightening.

Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it.

I think I’ll be the first.

I love dreams. I know enough about them to know that dream logic is no story logic, and that you can rarely bring a dream back as a tale: it will have transformed from gold into leaves. from silk to cobwebs, on waking.

So, maybe I’ll tell him about my dreams. No cobwebs yet.

We don’t have a clue what’s really going down, we just kid ourselves that we’re in control of our lives while a paper’s thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they’re tired, or bored.

On the other hand, what if this wasn’t true?

[b]Dave Eggers

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.[/b]

My guess: No one has ever said that of Don Trump’s lies.

You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.

Yet here we are day after day after day.

The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us.

Admittedly, it doesn’t look good.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

On the other hand, what if it’s ladders all the way down?

Why do you want to be on The Real World?
Because I want everyone to witness my youth
Why?
Isn’t it gorgeous?

He’s got us there, right? And not a damn thing we can do about it.

Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets agains, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.

Or: Once a year, she remembers that she is going to die. Then she forgets again, because more than remembering she is going to die, she is forgetful.

[b]tiny nietzsche

voids will be voids[/b]

Not counting mine of course.

c’mon, people. the earth isn’t going to kill itself

How much more can we do?

death is just your body rejecting you

But don’t take it personally, okay?

One of the things I enjoy is nothing. Try it.

On the other hand, you’ll have an eternity for that.

things that terrify wild animals:
human scent
headlights
windchimes

In that exact order no doubt.

my horoscope says they will come for me in the night

And not just Bob Mueller.

[b]C.G. Jung

The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of inexorable opposites—day and night, wellbeing and suffering, birth and death, good and evil. We are not even sure that the one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life and the world are a battleground.[/b]

Maybe, but at least most are able to choose sides. Confidently even.

Not everything I bring forth is written out of my head, but much of it comes from the heart also.

And how sloppy is that going to be? Or, rather, sloppier.

I had to follow the ineradicable foolishness which furnishes the steps to true wisdom.

Not much that doesn’t cover of course.

Myths, however, consist of symbols that were not invented but happened.

He means “happened”.

There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.

Sure, there couldn’t possibly be any difference.

The image of the world is half the world.

Or 60% tops.

[b]D. H. Lawrence

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.[/b]

So, how am I doing so far?

A curious latency stirred in her consciousness that was not yet an idea.

Let’s keep it that way, he thought.

What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.

If only on this side of the grave.

Quite frantically, he longed not to be.

Is there any other way?

One is so much harder if one has a touch of the man in one, don’t you think, and more able to bear things. But I’m afraid I’m all woman.

If only on the inside.

That’s the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

And then it’s recoils all the way down.

[b]so sad today

so annoyed that fantasy isn’t reality[/b]

Let’s blame God.

if i have to watch my whole life flash before my eyes when i die i’m going to be so annoyed

Though not for long. Well, if death is anything like I think it is.

omg i love your opinion about bullshit

Or here: i love your philosophy about bullshit

the war in my mind says hey

Really? The war in my mind says fuck you.

can’t stop peeing: the musical

Piss on that, right?

there are two kinds of people in this world and i’m hiding from them both

Me too. And with any luck they’re hiding from me.

[b]Paul Schrader

There’s no escape. I’m God’s only man.[/b]

So, does He know that?

I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?

My guess: That happiness is not always what it’s cracked up to be.

Don’t ever let the viewer settle in and get ahead of you.

Or here the poster.

Ultimately, it’s an illusion that you can understand yourself.

Or as close to ultimately as I’ve ever been.

Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film ‘noir’, as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.

I’m glad that’s finally settled, he thought.

When you have people who are embarrassing themselves for a living, who are making themselves look foolish and vulnerable and emotional for a living, your day-to-day reality is going to be a high-wire act. People are going to get in fights. People are going to get upset. People are going to walk off set. People are going to call each other names. It happens on every film that has any emotional people.

It’s a miracle that anything gets filmed at all.

[b]David Sedaris

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.[/b]

So, what’s the equivalent of that today?

I’d tried to straighten him out, but there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

Light beer at that.

I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn’t like it, and changed.

Right, just like that.

It’s safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America.

He figured he wouldn’t be around then and shrugged.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

Wow, do you think that might be true here?

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t.

As for cowboys, that’s Marlboro country of course.

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.[/b]

Then no one is. Not even me anymore.

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

If he said so himself.

I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.

Clearly the best one yet.

Love…no such thing.
Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that’s not love. That’s stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn’t exist.
Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.

And even that’s being optimistic.

By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

That’ll do it.

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed–and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

I’m no poet then. Why? Just lucky I guess.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We are our choices.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Not to mention the choices of others.

“I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded — and how pitiful that was.” Julian Barnes

I’m rather gratified myself.

“I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.” Julian Barnes

Not to worry, that’s perfectly normal.

“Even if we’re in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time.” Jacques Derrida

Well, sure, something has to happen.

“Such a caring for death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.” Jacques Derrida

Me, I’m sticking with “nothing left to lose”.

…and if the one is not, nothing is." Parmenides

Not many that isn’t applicable to.

[b]Hannah Arendt

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.[/b]

Or, alternately, both.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

A little help here please.

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

Well, they are after all objectivists.

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story … somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer … but nobody is the author …

I can live with that.

The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules.

Also, never underestimate the general stupidity of the masses. I mean, look at Trumpworld.

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.

Needless to say, our rendition of their evil, not their rendition of ours.

[b]Existential Comics

I’ve always hated the word “melancholy”, and I’ve always loved the word “vainglorious”. I believe I will retain this attitude until the day I die.[/b]

Noted. Now let’s move on.

[b]How to win any argument online:

  1. Willfully misinterpret your opponent.
  2. Accuse them of believing something absurd that no one on Earth believes.
  3. Vaguely clever zinger that has nothing to do with anything.[/b]

So, Kids, how does that strike you?

Property is theft.
Profit is theft.
Rent is theft.
Interest is theft.
Copyright is theft.
Shoplifting from Walmart is rad as hell and extremely good.

He may well be the last Communist on Earth.

I have no proof for this, but I feel like in America we have the best dogs. I walk around everyday and see all these nice dogs and I’m always like “there is no way they have this nice of dogs in France. No. Fucking. Way”.

Anyone from France able to rebut this?
How about the dogs in England?

People don’t want to admit it, but if Lenin were alive today he would have an extremely obnoxious Twitter account.

Imagine Stalin’s then.

Imagine how much better America would be if every adult American owned their very own guillotine.

Or, better still, their own nuclear arsenal.

[b]José Saramago

Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you’re born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.[/b]

Let’s decide: Really, really dumb or really really brilliant.

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

Let’s decide: Really, really dumb or really really brilliant.

…the only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see.

Among other things, how so?

… the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.

Like a rose could ever give a shit.

…for human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born…

And, of course, die.

…all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.

Not counting me of course.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

Don’t worry. They’re all against me. But I have one advantage: they don’t know what they want. I do.[/b]

Let’s try to guess what that is.

Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.

Yes, she actually did believe this. Though, sure, of some here it is probably true.

Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?

Unless, of course, you want to be a collectivist.

He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto–or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it, nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music.

Her music, no doubt, not mine.

I think the man who designed this should have committed suicide. A man who can conceive a thing as beautiful as this should never allowed it to be erected. He should not want to exist. But he will let it be built, so that women will hang out diapers on his terraces, so that men will spit on his stairways and draw dirty pictures on his walls. He’s given it to them and he’s made it part of them, part of everything. He shouldn’t have offered it for men like you to look at. For men like you to talk about. He’s defiled his own work by the first word you’ll utter about it. He’s made himself worse than you are. You’ll be committing only a mean little indecency, but he’s committed a sacrilege. A man who knows what he must have known to produce this should not have been able to remain alive.

Maybe?

Look, Gail. Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.

Or certainly one of them.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Aphorism is dead.
Like all of us.
Soon.[/b]

Or, sure, not soon enough.

No, hipsters, the Hitler mustache is not coming back, even ironically.

Since I don’t follow these things, is it?

Abraham Lincoln wrestled with depression, but that did not stop him from impersonating Daniel Day-Lewis while working as a cobbler in Venice.

You know, in a parallel universe.

Does anyone have a spare bunker?

Now that sounds ominous.

When you meet death, lower your head and charge.

Talk about futility!

Every month is crueler than the last. And then you die.

Eventually: Every hour is crueler than the last. And then you die

[b]Jessie Burton

For what am I, she wonders, but a product of my own imagination?[/b]

That and all the real stuff.

Do you have a body if there is no one there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t. I was just a mind floating around the rooms.

Most of course are content to touch it themselves.

You are a stone, thrown upon a lake. But the ripples you create will never make you still.

Okay, but what if you are thrown into the ocean instead? The Pacific Ocean say.

Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was – and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.

How about “like most philosophers…”?

But how right is it to kill a man for something that is in his soul?

My guess: As right as you need it to be.

Nothing here is more fabulous than the truth.

In other words, one or the other.