a thread for mundane ironists

[b]José Saramago

…we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.[/b]

I know: Where to begin.

The day before is what we bring to the day we’re actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.

Unless of course you go to Heaven. Whatever that means.

…doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time…

More than a privilege it is [for some of us] practically mandatory.

…anyone who has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly.

Few things are truer.

…our God, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad…

On the other hand, does He know that?

Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.

Let’s file this one under, “what else is new?”

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold–with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.[/b]

And how comforting is that?

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

On the other hand, how wrong?

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.

Let alone an actual landmass.

Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.

Or another time.

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

Here, that’s me, right? Unless of course it’s you.

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

Not counting all the shit in nature He throws at us.

[b]Martha Nussbaum

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.[/b]

Some things are overthought. And this might be one of them.

As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.

Complete hogwash, right, Mr. Objectivist?

You can’t really change the heart without telling a story.

Let’s just say for better or worse.

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

Up in the clouds, in particular.

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

Their ignorance, not ours.

Another problem with people who fail to examine themselves is that they often prove all too easily influenced.

Cue Trumpworld. For starters.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” Otto von Bismarck[/b]

Actually, it’s too close to call. If you learn anything at all.

“The death of dogma is the birth of morality.” Immanuel Kant

For example, categorically and imperatively.

“The bad thing of war is that it makes more evil people than it can take away.” Immanuel Kant

Whatever the hell that means. On Wall Street for example.

“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.” John Locke

Cue, among others, Marx and Engels.

“Change has no constituency.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Just the power to enforce it.

“Stubborn and ardent clinging to one’s opinion is the best proof of stupidity.” Michel de Montaigne

Not counting you and I of course.

[b]Lillian Hellman

I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night.[/b]

With or without godot.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

Should has got nothing to do with it.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.

Tell that to your liver.

Unjust. How many times I’ve used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don’t have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

Just abstract enough to probably be true.

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.

On the other hand, fuck all that.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

Indeed, we got a few of them here.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.[/b]

And, increasingly, the ordinary woman.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

And how might that be?

Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.
They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.

Though perhaps no less sincerely.

You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint.

Again and again, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. Depending on what they do instead of not do.

He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I’m imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it’s all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

Sometimes they do this to us, sometimes we do this to them. And sometimes we do this to ourselves.

Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

This sounds about as plausible as it doesn’t.

[b]Nein

Remember, friends, it’s not too late now. That was decades ago.[/b]

Or at least going back to Don Trump’s inauguration.

Hate. It would love to get your vote.

Their hate in particular.

Live. Laugh. Seize the means of production.

Or: Live. Laugh. Seize the means of production. Laugh some more.
Or, sure, cry.

A gentle reminder from the ethicists that, yes, most people are good. But, no, most people aren’t most people.

No getting around that, right?

Guns or butter. Sturm or Drang. Trick or treat.

Come on, he thought, why not both?

You buy our weapons. We’ll buy your excuses.

And not just in Riyadh.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from.[/b]

That or finding out it wasn’t an accident at all.

Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing.

Still, he thought, in this world a buck’s a buck.

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man’s books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

Some still being more forbidden than others.

The Declaration of Independence is like a map. You trust that it’s right but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.

Then [as with Constitution] being or not being a strict constructionist.

Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.

Or, if you are particularly in a hurry, the last flight.

It was nigh impossible to understand Howard’s speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words except for the ones locked away by those who still remembered who they had been before. “They keep 'em hid like precious gold,” Mabel said.

Not of much use now one suspects. But point taken.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Despite the chronic shortages of almost every good and commodity, there was no shortage of paper, since everyone in the neighborhood was required to write confessions on a periodic basis.[/b]

Imagine them reading mine!

…people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed…

My guess: It depends on the joke.

There is always something. That is confession’s nature.

Or, as I prefer to put it, “there’s always never nothing.”

Disarming an idealist was easy.

Next up: Arming one.

What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?

Can someone here tell us?

This was what few people realize—it’s hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse.

Of course it’s almost certainly easier than getting the beating.

[b]Werner Twertzog

We must, of course, destigmatize nonexistence.[/b]

Like that will make it go away.

By 2024 U.S. political party membership will be determined by DNA testing. As we all know.

Gee, I wonder what mine will reveal? A party of one I suspect.

It is never an option to define someone as beyond the pale of humanity. Excepting Kinski.

Surely we can, uh, trump that.

The apocalypse is being crowdsourced.

God from our end, the Devil from theirs.

Toxic masculinity is the primary cause of climate change, as we all know.

As in, “fuck Mother Nature!”

Halloween is important, but let us not forget the potential, every day, for horror.

No problem. What’s up for today?

[b]Mario Vargas Llosa

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.[/b]

How preposterous is that, he thought.

Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.

How preposterous is that, he thought.
Though, sure, maybe.

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

Not that this has ever actually happened yet.

Death isn’t enough. It doesn’t remove the stain.

First, of course, show us the stain.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

Not unlike a life itself.

…writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

Like getting paid to.

[b]Dave Eggers

This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.[/b]

It’s all but normal now.

We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

They would be disappointed. For example, 365 days a year.

And worse, you’re not doing anything interesting anymore. You’re not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you’re at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven’t done anything offscreen in months. Have you?

No, he thought, but, increasingly, I’m convinced that someday I might. Well, if I don’t die first.

The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That’s the best you can do.

Here especially.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

And good philosophers?

But of course there’s no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It’s the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons.

For example: youtu.be/kZcyRLtwUVY

[b]God

When I start talking to you, you should start talking to a mental health professional.[/b]

Anyone here ever tried that? How’d it go?

I just tried banging on the side of the planet a few times but it didn’t fix anything.

Caused a few earthquakes though.

The problem with government of the people, by the people and for the people is the people.

That can’t be good. Coming from the one who created us.

I have lost control of the situation.

And not just in Washington D.C.

I’m not a parody account, you’re a parody species.

And that’s just on this planet.

Sooner or later you’re all going to die. I can’t stress this enough.

Meaning that Heaven and Hell are expanding all the time. Into what though?

[b]Philip Larkin

I’d like to think that people in pubs would talk about my poems.[/b]

Sure, when they’re not discussing dasein and conflicting goods.

In times when nothing stood
but worsened, or grew strange
there was one constant good: she did not change.

Unfortunately [for most of us] she never existed.

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself…

Of course I’m smack dab in the middle of it myself.
Doesn’t surprise you though, does it?
So, will it surprise you?

…books are a load of crap…

What’s that make posts then?

Birthdays are a time when one stock takes, which means, I suppose, a good spineless mope.

Trust me: Some birthdays more than others.

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

Or, for some of us, masturbation.

[b]David Hockney

We grow small trying to be great.[/b]

My guess: Not all of us.

When you’re very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It’s quite exciting, and you’re prepared to do anything.

Great, he thought, thanks for reminding me.

There would be no bohemia without smoking.

Dope, for example.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.

Complete bullshit of course.

I’m coming around to the view that there’s only a personal view of the world.

Like there could possibly be any other.

Any artist will tell you he’s really only interested in the stuff he’s doing now. He will, always. It’s true, and it should be like that.

Right, like there is any way he could possibly know this.

[b]William F. Buckley

Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.[/b]

Unlike conservatives who insist that only their own point of view even counts.

Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.

Right, like conservatives don’t harrangue us with their own dogmas.

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.

Not unlike, for example, liberalism.

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing.

Anone here care to bring this down to earth?

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth.

Anone here care to bring this down to earth?

Pentagon ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize every year, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace.

Now, doesn’t this speak volumes regarding just how idiotic the man could be? Or would someone here like to defend that point of view?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Are your children texting about philosophy?
LMAO = Leibniz misread Aristotelian ontology
IMHO = Idealism makes Heidegger ornery
FWIW = Foucauldians won’t instrumentalize Wittgenstein
ROTFL = Rationalists obviously truly fear Lucretius[/b]

How idiotic or clever is this?

Classical aesthetics: Truth is beauty
Romantic aesthetics: Beauty is truth
Modernist aesthetics: What are you looking at?

Postmodern aesthetics: Who the fuck cares?

Hegel: I can only go on not being what I am not going to not have been
Kierkegaard: I can only go on sacrificing what I am in order to become what I will never have been
Sartre: I can only go out for so many coffees

Well, at least Jean Paul is down to earth.

French philosophy: Mind or body?
German philosophy: Will or whim?
British philosophy: Causal or casual?
American philosophy: Coke or Pepsi?

It’s still Coke, right?

When the apocalypse comes
Schopenhauer: you’ll wish it had arrived much earlier
Camus: you’ll realize it’s been here all along
Kafka: it’ll turn out to have been one day too late

On the other hand, what if it doesn’t come at all?

philosophy student: I thought we’d learn about truth!
art student: I thought we’d learn about beauty!
law student: I thought we’d learn about justice!
economics student: You want the truth? Beauty and justice won’t make you rich!

Let alone get you elected president.

[b]David Sedaris

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.[/b]

There’s really only one off switch of course. Unless you count all the others.

In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.

Priorities in other words.

In Japanese and Italian, the response to “How are you?” is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.”

Let’s confirm this.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

Really, what if that explains it?

The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing…I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

Like we can actually live without them now.

I’d always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call “understanding” is basically just fantasizing.

If not actual insanity.

[b]Existential Comics

Person who gets all the credit:
Movies: director.
Plays: writer.
Musical: composer.
Musician: performer.

Person who gets no credit:
Movies: writer.
Plays: director.
Musical: director.
Musician: composer.[/b]

Let’s explain why that’s true.

Computers are cool and all, but I still feel like the microwave is the most futuristic thing we’ve made. You put your food in, and magic invisible lasers just make it hot in like 10 seconds. WTF?

Is it even possible to doubt this?

What did I learn from philosophy?
From Aristotle: how to be virtuous.
From Epictetus: how to deal with loss.
From Descartes: how to be skeptical. From Sartre: how to be free.
From Russell: how to ground math in logic so you can be sure 2+2=4, only for a paradox to destroy it all.

That’s still four things more than I learned.

Moral relativism is bad because it gives us no ground to say that Tom Brady sucks and the Patriots should lose every game forever from now on.

My guess: That’s literally the least of it.

Should we all own guns in case the government gets too tyrannical? Maybe.
Should we all own guillotines in case the private sector gets too tyrannical? Absolutely.

He really, really hates capitalism.

The reason ghosts are so scary is because it means that we might have to live forever.

True, he thought, but I’ll roll the dice.

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.[/b]

Lots of poets think that. And that’s before they get to the even more barbarous main event.

Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire!

Not the real Satan of course.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,
Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

Let’s help each other to actually find it.

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?

I’ll bet for some of you it has.

What an old maid I’m getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!

It sort of just creeps up on you.

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are fake niggers; maniacs, savages, misers, all of you.

Imagine him saying that today.