a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Elena Ferrante

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.[/b]

Let’s measure our own childhood by this.

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.

Let’s measure our own relationships by this.

Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination?

Sure…if that’s where you want to take them.

Once, she closed the book abruptly and said with annoyance, That’s enough.
Why?
Because I’ve had it, it’s always the same story: inside something small there’s something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there’s always something larger that wants to keep it a prisoner.

Let’s come up with examples.

Not for you, Lila replies ardently, you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all.

In other words, to rise above Miss Oliviero’s “plebs”.

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me…I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.

Join the crowd.

[b]Garry Kasparov

In 1987, Gorbachev said he wanted to build Alexander Dubček’s “socialism with a human face,” to which I responded that Frankenstein’s monster also had a human face. Communism goes against human nature and can only be sustained by totalitarian repression.[/b]

This is probably true. But there is no way in which to know for sure. And then there will always be the systemic horrors embedded in capitalism.

Putinism "the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism” and “the coup de grâce” to the head of the Russian nation.

Let’s run this by Trump of course.

One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one’s enemies.

Not counting the Republicans.

In “Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition "the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.”

Either a victim or the master race.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights.

He means his priciples of course. After all, even the Commies can have the best of intentions.

The machines have finally come for the white collared, the college graduates, the decision makers. And it’s about time.

Having already thumped folks like him.

[b]José Saramago

Keep what is of no use at the moment, and later you will find what you need.[/b]

Anyone ever foolish enough to try that?

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith.

True, but why ballistics?

We are born, and at that moment, it is as if we had signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves ‘Who signed this on my behalf’?

Perhaps. But don’t actually expect an answer.

We all know, however, that the enormous weight of tradition, habit, and custom that occupies the greater part of our brain bears down pitilessly on the more brilliant and innovative ideas of which the remaining part is capable, and although it is true that, in some cases, this weight can balance the excesses and extravagances of the imagination that would lead us God knows where were they given free rein, it is equally true that it often has a way of subtly submitting what we believed to be our free will to unconscious tropisms, like a plant that does not know why it will always have to lean toward the side from which the light comes.

Perhaps. But don’t expect this to not be extremely complicated.

All the great sadnesses, great temptations, and great mistakes are almost always the result of being alone in life, without a prudent friend to advise us when we are troubled by something more serious than our normal everyday problems.

Oddly enough, he thought it was just the opposite.

…given the behaviour of human beings throughout the ages, they do not deserve life, with its many dark sides, in all its beauty, grandeur and magnificence…

Of course deserving has nothing to do with it.

[b]Valeria Luiselli

I’ve always thought that hell is the people you could one day become. The most frightening ones.[/b]

But not you right?

Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything.

Or [far more likely] something about some things.

But perhaps a person only has two real residences: the childhood home and the grave.

And you are either closer to one than to the other.

The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or—even worse—might be a tourist.

He wondered why that should concern us.

Perhaps it’s right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable.

You know where I’d take this.

Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.

And if that’s the only option?