a thread for mundane ironists

[b]José Saramago

Put less respectfully, these men and women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.[/b]

Time to get a new mirror. However futile that might be.

…human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.

We’ll need some examples of course.

Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune…

Let’s just say that here it depends on how broadly or narrowly you define them.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Perhaps not still seems more likely.

Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.

And what meaning might that be, he asked?

It just isn’t possible for you to ask me all the questions, or for me to give you all the answers.

Pertaining to, say, what’s behind the existence of existence itself? :wink:

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Read Schopenhauer to understand Nietzsche.
Read Hegel to understand Schopenhauer.
Read Kant to understand Hegel.
Then read Spinoza to understand that you don’t understand anything.[/b]

Oh, and why is that?

[b]Would have taken Twitter by storm:
Pascal
Hume
Wittgenstein
Adorno
Lacan

Would do well to stick to Facebook:
Plato
Descartes
Kant
Heidegger
Derrida[/b]

Let’s entirely clear this up.

Who gave philosophy such a bad name?
Plato: Sophistry
Aristotle: Plato
Leibniz: Aristotle
Hume: Leibniz
Kant: Hume
Hegel: Kant
Schopenhauer: Hegel
Nietzsche: philosophers

Let’s entirely clear this up.

Bacon: Knowledge is power
Foucault: Power shapes interpretation
Nietzsche: Interpretation destroys knowledge
Hegel: The destruction of knowledge is knowledge
Bacon: Knowledge is power

Hey, what goes around comes around, right?

Idealism: You’ve got all the answers for all the right reasons
Realism: You’ve got all the answers for all the wrong reasons
Materialism: You don’t have any answers for all the right reasons
Existentialism: You don’t have any answers for all the wrong reasons

Thank god for nihilism, he thought.

[b]A Brief History of Philosophy

  1. Know the void
  2. Accept the void
  3. Embrace the void
  4. Fill the void
  5. Null and void[/b]

Who cares, as long as there’s a void there.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Morning always comes.[/b]

Among other things, define “always”.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.

Not only that but with no end in sight.

Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

And for all practical purposes [in this world] they aren’t.

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

And look how useful we are here.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

Though not unlike any other Scripture.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Brain cancer as it were.

[b]Rebecca Wells

It’s life. You don’t figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.[/b]

And, then, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.

Smoke, drink and never think.

Or, sure, just drink and never think.

Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.

Either that or every other every time.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Screened in all the way around.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

Or, as likely as not, what he claims to remember.

Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to. This is something that I’ve struggled with my whole life long.

Sounds trite of course. Until you actually know what it means.

[b]Existential Comics

I wonder how many times they will manage to reboot Spiderman before we destroy the planet[/b]

Hundreds at least.

1930: comics made us dumb!
1950: TV made us dumb!
1990: the internet made us dumb!
2018: you know what, maybe we are just naturally dumb.

Well, the Kids anyway.

It’s important to read broadly to understand just how much there is to know, and it’s important to read deeply to understand just how hard it is to know even a single thing.

My guess: Going all the way back to explaining the existence of existence itself. :wink:

Existentialism is:
Sartre: freedom.
Kierkegaard: despair.
Nietzsche: will.
Dostoevsky: axing an old lady in the head for no reason.

All of the above?

[b]The seven deadly sins for an existentialist:

  1. Inauthenticity
  2. Denying your freedom
  3. Acting in bad faith
  4. Following the herd
  5. Believing in absolutes
  6. Denying responsibility
  7. Not setting your profile pic to a black and white photo of you gazing deeply into the horizon[/b]

Spot the outlier here?

Nihilism: nothing matters.
Existentialism: life is despair.
Absurdism: there is no meaning.
Stoicism: chill the fuck out.

Spot the outlier here?

[b]Pat Conroy

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.[/b]

I know that I’ve always been.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Still, you might not think so at the time.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

Actually, I think he means men in general.

A story untold could be the one that kills you.

I know some that might have killed me.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

Me? Well, let’s just say I’ve tried to.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

So they tell me.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

I’ve been sitting here and thinking about God. I don’t think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn’t intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can’t care about the individuals. He’s planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. So he doesn’t exist, really.[/b]

Think of it like this: youtu.be/zOusKPeH7nU

You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don’t you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

Nasty. As good a word as any.

The two of us in that room. No past, no future…A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

Or a big fat Buddha.

This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn’t necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.
All in vain. All wasted.
The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.
More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.

For some their own existence being the least of it.

But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.

It only sort of happens to most of us.

Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way—they don’t mind that. It even excites them. But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way.

For some of course we hope that they never do.

[b]tiny nietzsche

you’re nobody until somebody kills you[/b]

That almost doesn’t make sense.

me: it hurts when I think
doktor: you should try and let things go
me: I’ve thought about it

How about you?

It’s a Blood Clot, Charlie Brown

Let’s run this by Lucy.

every day is “take your abyss to work” day

Work and [of course] everywhere else.

hell means never having to say you’re sartre

Now that’s clever.

me: it’s december
doktor: yes?
me: well, can’t you fucking fix it?

Next up: January.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.[/b]

You know, if you’re on a diet.

Spoiler: I didn’t win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be “The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!” instead of having the word “Death” in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars?

Nope, didn’t spoil it for me.

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

Or: Spoken like a true Earthling.

I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription – the American imperative.

Rhymes with Trump.

Was it counterintuitive to apply lessons from a women’s self-defense book to the World Series of Poker? Yes. But if modernity has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t fuck with Oprah.

Let’s try to understand this.

Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.

Of course [as we all know] entropy has all the time in the world.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.[/b]

Of course, up in the clouds, there is no actual front line.

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.

On the other hand, there’s always waterboarding.

Quoting Nguyen Du — “Talent and destiny are apt to feud.”

Still, destiny would seem to have the edge.

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise.

Perhaps even deeply latent.

Let’s just hope history forgets the snafus.

If only our own.

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie.

And then call it “the virtue of selfishness”.

[b]Mario Vargas Llosa

Borges’s world is as grounded in the changing nature of existence, that common predicament of the human species, as any literary world that has lasted. How could it be otherwise? No work of fiction that turns its back on life or that is incapable of illuminating life has ever attained durability. What is singular about Borges is that in his world the existential, the historical, sex, psychology, feelings, instincts, and so forth, have been dissolved and reduced to an exclusively intellectual dimension; and life, that boiling, chaotic turmoil, reaches the reader sublimated and conceptualized, transformed into literary myth through the filter of Borges, a filter of such perfect logic that it sometimes appears not to distill life to its essence but to suppress it altogether.[/b]

Let’s file file this one under, “it had to be said.”

Don’t be afraid Mr. Onaka, we need you because none of us drives.
Can you imagine anything as dumb as that? They were going to make a revolution and they didn’t even know how to drive a car.

Let alone a tank.

I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don’t.

For a few, mysterious and then some.

There were so many problems; the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.

If only since the dawn of history.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple: it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

And then the present to fit the future.

Probably there are no longer any societies in which the best people are attracted to civic duties.

Anyone disagree?

[b]so sad today

being born is a lot of pressure[/b]

And it’s not as though we asked to be.

one thing i don’t like is the way things are

Worse: the way things are going to be.

i was born not ready

On the other hand, hardly anyone ever actually is.

whispers during sex ‘am i problematic’?

Okay, but before or after coming?

because i could not stop for death he kindly waited outside whole foods

On the other hand, it could have been a McDonalds.

talent: believing my own bullshit

A greater talent still: getting others to believe it.

[b]Dave Eggers

No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.[/b]

Anyone here not realize that yet?

We were fools and now we were driving to our deaths in a rental car. Janet Jackson was tinkling from the speakers, asking what we had done for her as of late.

Don’t you just hate that?

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world.

This really is an important insight, he thought.

Stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move.

Not counting all the times it’s the move instead.

People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they’ve woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I’ll be talking, and will be interested in what I’m saying, but then someone—I’m convinced this what happens—someone—and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person—for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.

No, this is actually a real thing.

The idea we came up with, well before we left, was something we coined Performance Literature. Excuse the use of that second word, because I realize it’s presumptuous. Also, excuse the first word, and the term in general.

Lots of things like that are thought up here of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.” Alexander Pushkin[/b]

Let’s note some of late.

"Leisure is the mother of philosophy” Thomas Hobbes

No, really, think about that.

“We see that humans are formed by the same things as the other animals.” Bernardino Telesio

My guess: evolution.

“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” William Faulkner

If only to trample on the freedom of others.

"The problem is that the child is a sponge and absorbs indiscriminately everything that is seen on TV and the Internet ” Giovanni Sartori

The Kids too.

“Wake from death and return to life.” Japanese Proverb

If, of course, that’s actually an option.

[b]Robert Cormier

Sometimes I wake up at night in a panic. Wondering: What will my life be like? And sometimes I even wonder: Who am I? What am I doing here, on this planet, in this city, in this house? And it gives me the shivers, makes me panic.[/b]

They have an expression for that, don’t they? And it’s the same as ours.

Eric Poole began with cats. Or, to be more exact, kittens.

We know where this is going.

I wonder if it’s a special sin to lie to a nun.

Or, he thought, to fuck one.

I have always pondered a tragic law of adolescence. (On second thought, the law probably applies to all ages to some extent). That law: People fall in love at the same time—often at the same stunning moment—but they fall out of love at different times. One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other has danced away.

That’s how it works alright. You’re either one or the other.

Happiness is a way of traveling and not a destination.

If you know what he means. And I think that I do.

At some point in life, we learn our limitations, the distances we can we can travel and the boarders we will never cross. And we go from there.

Right, like we need yet another reminder.

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

…money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.[/b]

That and mutual distrust.

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

How much better some might ask.

…happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.

Thanks for reminding us.

As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.

Thanks for reminding us.

Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.

Does God know that?

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.

Not only that but more still.

[b]Russell Banks

Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I’ll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.[/b]

You get this or you don’t.

…I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death.

Hardly the opposite for many Christians.

It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.

He thought: Name one. But, sure, for others, point taken.

A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it’s this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it’s cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It’s the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.

No super powers. No tattoos. Only one name. But often somebody else.

In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.

Anyone here live in one?

Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin’s as white as the rich man’s, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.

So, does this describe you, Kid?

[b]Werner Twertzog

In the infinite scale of time and space, it is as if you never existed. So, relax, why do you not?[/b]

Among other things, it just doesn’t work that way.

Do not bother about your legacy. You already are forgotten.

Not many here that doesn’t include.

Do not bring an alternative epistemology to a knife-fight.

Let alone an alternative teleology.

If you have wooden signs with sayings like “Eat, Pray, Love” on them, I shall exit your house immediately.

If not burn it to the ground.

Men do not climb mountains because “they are there.” They do so because life is meaningless.

In that case, that’s why they do everything.

Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.

Which 1/3 are you?

[b]David Sedaris

Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they’re not living in a democratic nation.[/b]

To vote for example.

The things I’ve bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

Just out of curiosity: Why would someone do that?

In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.

Probably not true, right?

Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer.

We’ll need examples, of course.

In New York I’d go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I’ve upped it to six or seven, mainly because I’m too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It’s not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it’s just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we’ve agreed to lower the bar.

Either that, or, out in Hollywood, bury it underground.

There are things you forget naturally—computer passwords, your father’s continuing relationship with life—and then there are things you can’t forget that you wish you could.

Hundreds of them by now.

[b]The Dead Author

Today’s Ebenezer Scrooges give to charity and celebrate Christmas with their employees in order to undermine support for the welfare state and weaken the distinction between work and leisure time.[/b]

All none of them.

By age 30, you should have realized that nobody cares which books you own, letting you read whatever you want and saving money for some quality tableware.

He means by age 20 of course.

Socrates walks into a bar, according to Plato.

Let’s try to imagine it [just once] the other way around.

A real introvert will always make you feel like you’re the boring one.

So, any particular reason why?

Sex is cool but have you ever thought of dying alone.

Talk about a non sequitur!

[b]Ladies, if he

lives with his parents
hates his job
blames his dad
is always sick
has a weird sense of humor
has been engaged three times
has a bad friend
writes unpublished fiction

you might be dating world-famous author Franz Kafka.[/b]

You know, if he’s still around.