a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.[/b]

Let’s start doing that here, okay?

I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man’s mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn’t it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness…

Holes [and tunnels] coming and going.

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

Let’s figure out who runs things here. Then, sure, change it.

If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

Nope, nothing yet.
Right?

Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.

And I doubt that changes just because you’re gay.

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it’s been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.

Them as often as not.

[b]Neil Gaiman

He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.[/b]

Any kind people make it here? Or are we all still monsters?

They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn’t it?

Maybe, maybe not.

Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.

Either that or just make something up.

The universe knows someone is missing, and slowly it attempts to replace him.

Okay, but what about her?

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Anything from God on the World Series yet?

It’s easier to believe in aliens than in gods.

And easier for the aliens to believe in us.

[b]so sad today

what the fuck is everything[/b]

First off, why do you want to know?

in theory i’m totally over you

In theory I don’t agree.

just forgot that life is pain and then remembered again

And, no, not just in theory one suspects.

take a lot of naps and ignore a lot of people

Repeat as necessary.

i’m always late for everything because i don’t want to be anywhere

My advice: shoot for not showing up at all.

gonna stop worrying about shit beyond my control just kidding

Besides, if you’re doing it right, it can’t be done.

[b]Dave Eggers

When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.[/b]

He thought [repeatedly]: Don’t get me started!

We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? Young people are creating ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive.

Fortunately [for us] there’s not much clarity here.

Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself.

Any dorks here, Kids?

Thank you, he says.
Thank who?
I don’t know. You?
No, not me. Jesus.
Thank you, Jesus?
Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.

But only after He invented the credit card.
You know, if that’s actually true.

I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.

You’d think it might be the other way around.

Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they’d trade it all to know they’ve been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.

Once that was 15 minutes, but now most will settle for the blink of an eye.

[b]Philip Larkin

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.[/b]

Let’s explain how we write philosophy. And then see what happens.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

Really, how can nothing happen anywhere? Let alone reconfigure into something everywhere.

Sex means nothing–just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

Unless of course you count reproduction.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It’s very strange how often strong feelings don’t seem to carry any message of action.

You wonder: What was nature thinking?

I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time’s - it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not.

You wonder: What was nature thinking?

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide.

Next thing you know, we’re huffing and puffing.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” Jorge Luis Borges[/b]

Wow, who would have ever thunk that?

“To what purpose should I trouble myself about the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?” Anaximenes of Miletus.

I know: What would Carl Sagan say?

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates

He means huffing and puffing of course.
Right, Kids?

“Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.” Socrates

Let’s say that’s what my walls here are for.

“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.” Karl Popper

Ultimately evolving and/or devolving into one or another TOE.

“Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.” Søren Kierkegaard

And this may well be true objectively.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.[/b]

At least there is an end, he thought.

Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding.

And then the part where we’re six feet under it.

You live most intensely in human contact—and that’s what we shrink from, poor timid creatures, from giving our souls to somebody to touch; for they, bungling fools, will generally paw it with dirty hands.

I know the bungling fools here do. If not literally.

He felt again irresistibly drawn to her. He felt there was a secret bond, a secret thread between him and her, something very exclusive, which shut out everybody else and made him and her possess each other in secret.

Anyone here actually ever come close?

If it be not true to me,
What care I how true it be.
Though it be not true to thee,
It’s gay and gospel truth to me.

No getting around that, right?

Bolshevism, it seems to me, said Charlie, is just a superlative hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is, isn’t quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man without them.

Maybe this is close enough, maybe it’s not.

[b]William F. Buckley, Jr.

Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples’ money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples’ freedom and security.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “true by definition.” His for example.

I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.

He noted to the man in the mirror while shaving.

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.

And not just at The National Review.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

Starting with the folks on Wall Street.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.

Just look at the bailout of the banking industry.

I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.

And he’s closer to the truth here than we are. Well, assuming of course there is a God that did in fact turn out to be his God.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Kant: Don’t lie.
Hegel: Don’t steal.
Schopenhauer: Don’t underestimate the power of despair.
Nietzsche: Don’t make me laugh.[/b]

Too close to call?

At the pinnacle of wisdom you become
325 BCE: a philosopher king
1781: a tutor to the rich
1910: a Cambridge don
2018: an insufferable promoter of your Twitter feed

Though nowhere near as insufferable as some of us here are.

[b]Why should I study philosophy?

  1. To avoid law school
  2. To avoid med school
  3. To avoid business school
  4. Pirated PDFs of Spinoza and Hume abound on the interwebs[/b]

Or, sure, for the sheer joy of it.

Science: This
History: This then that
Literature: This means that
Philosophy: This therefore that
Economics: I’ll give you this for that
Politics: I’ll keep this and take that

Though not necessarily in that order.

Schopenhauer: We’re doomed
Beckett: We’re hopelessly doomed
Kafka: We’re doomed beyond hope and doom
Camus: Your collective optimism is nauseating

Of course Camus was a fucking genius.

Living “off the grid” means
2010: the wifi is weak in your closet
2014: you once went outside without your cellphone
2016: you took off your Apple Watch during surgery
2018: your hair dryer isn’t Alexa-enabled

Anyone here [besides me] even more off the grid than that?

[b]David Sedaris

It is funny the things that run through your mind when you’re sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.[/b]

Either that or buck naked with an erection.

What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I’ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.

Or, if it’s a woman, a bush.

There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus “Leave me the fuck alone” comes out as “Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point.”

Don’t you just hate that?

The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

Anyone here like this?

The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention.

Of course for you it might be others.

A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.

Different folks, different strokes, right?

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.[/b]

And then eventually you go nowhere fast.
If you’re lucky.

[b]My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.[/b]

Let’s decide what was most insane about it.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

I can do that now before breakfast.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I reviled her.

Of course we’ll need to hear her side.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.

I wonder how that turned out, he thought.

Eternity is the sun
mixed
with the sea

Including death of course.

[b]Werner Twertzog

I am told that death is the new 60.[/b]

Hmm. I’m dead and then some.

A man walks into a bar.
He orders a gin and tonic.
Instead, he is shot.
Death awaits us all.

And not just in bars.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Also bad intentions.
All intentions lead to hell.
Intend nothing.

On the other hand, try not to.

If I block you, you cease to exist. As we all know.

If I foe you, you cease to exist. As you know now.

The Shining, with Kinski: #MakeAHorrorMovieMoreHorrific

That would do it.

Facebook is important for learning that ideology, in the U.S., is now more important than love.

True, but still not even close to being more important than money.

[b]Hannah Arendt

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.[/b]

Our own nontotalitarian world of course not theirs.

Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs—neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.

I think she means folks like me. On the other hand, it’s beyond my control.

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

Right, like having your very own death makes you less dead. Though, sure, by all means, point taken.

What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality—as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.

Right, instinctive morality.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

Let’s file this one under “mutually assured destruction”.

Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureaucrats in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.

Not only that but now Nobody is too big to fail.

[b]Jose Saramago

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.[/b]

Who knows, but it sounds about right.

But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don’t, poor things, lapse into oblivion.

Of course the ones I allege are already there, right?

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one’s head but unable to feel love.

Love being the least of it for me.

…this is the way fate usually treats us, it’s right there behind us, it has already reached out a hand to touch us on the shoulder while we’re still muttering to ourselves, It’s all over, that’s it, who cares anyhow.

And that’s before we die.

The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.

Sounds like a miracle to me.

Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone…if you didn’t migrate then your father did, and if your father didn’t need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him…

Someone bring this to the attention of, among others, Don Trump.

[b]Existential Comics

It’s not so much that I hate getting up early, it’s that I hate getting up at all.[/b]

Wow, and I thought I was the only one.

Breaking news: humanity is doomed.

If only one at a time. You know, for now.

Everyone knows State media is propaganda under a dictator, but somehow people think billionaire owned media under capitalism is “the free press”.

Somehow they think lots of things like that.

The complete history of philosophers who you could picture eating a hotdog after it had fallen on the ground:
500 BC: Heraclitus
400 BC: Diogenes
390: Augustine
1050: Anselm
1500: Machiavelli (if no one was looking)
1750: Hume
1850: Marx
1900: Frege
1950: Sartre
2018: Žižek

My guess: He just made this up.

There is really only one thing that every culture from every age has agreed upon: that dinosaurs are cool as shit.

Though [surely] not as cool as that thing from space that wiped them out. If you get my drift.

[b]Top five philosophers of ALL TIME:
5. Hegel
4. Descartes
3. Kant
2. Plato

  1. Whoever it was that came up with the slogan “be gay, do crimes”[/b]

Let’s decide what the hell that means.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

When I listen to a symphony I love, I don’t get from it what the composer got. His ‘Yes’ was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.[/b]

But then of course there’s my take on this.

Roark smiled, Gail, if this boat were sinking, I’d give my life to save you. Not because it’s any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t live for you.

Really, he thought, can the true Objectivist die for someone?

You’ll get everything society can give a man. You’ll keep all the money. You’ll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You’ll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I’ll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt.

The part before he blows it up.

I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom. To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

Let’s file this one [knowing Alvah] under, “in one ear and out the other”.

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.

Trust me: Only her rendition of if. Indeed, try being independent of that.

The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

Remember when that might actually have been true?

[b]Herta Müller

To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.[/b]

Not that it can be any other way.

No cities can grow in a dictatorship, because everything stays small when it’s being watched.

Back then maybe.

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity.

Not that this actually worked of course.

Hey, not while I’m at my devotions, not so fast, the fat man said, inside the shithouse you’re communing with God, and outside you find that all hell’s broken loose.

The shithouse conundrum.

All of that piles on you so that, sooner or later, you cannot bear it anymore. And in that situation I started to write, because there was no other ways for me to express, except through the vicious cycle of words.

He thought: That’s me here.

We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood, it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.

Let’s pin down where it is here.

[b]God

This is a scary time for young men who commit sexual assault and want to get away with it.[/b]

Of course we’re still counting on Him to send them to Hell.

Thoughts and prayers are for shit.

Come on, even God has a bad day.

It’s getting to where men can’t do something awful without being accused of having done it.

Fortunately, it doesn’t work that way in Heaven.

Don’t worry America, everything will change after November 6, because that’s when the asteroid hits.

You heard it here.

Where the hell am I?

See, even He doesn’t know.

Never forget that for every public official who is stupid and awful, there are thousands of ordinary citizens who are also stupid and awful.

After all, how can you have one without the other?

[b]Lillian Hellman

You don’t always know how to do things when they’re happening.[/b]

If only from the cradle to the grave.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

And when was there ever a time without scondrels.

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it’s a stinking way to create.

I’ll bet it is.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody’s mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] I don’t know what to believe.

You lose your manners when you’re poor.

Not that anyone around you notices.

I’ve always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I’ve not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced—although often I’ve had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there’s no nicer feeling in the world—what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can’t get that from a book. It’s a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you’ve done.

Let’s imagine others reacting to what we’ve done here.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.[/b]

That’s a stretch sure. Except the part that’s not.

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren’t ashamed of being dull and little.

And now she’s been kidnapped by one.

It’s despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It’s despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It’s despair that so few of us care. It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world. It’s despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they’ve won a lot of money. And then do what you’ve done to me.

Of course as we know that doesn’t work.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.

What happens to the stuff we post here?

he power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We’re so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours.

Expect there to be exceptions.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can’t you understand? I don’t think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

So, does that make the world better or worse?