a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Zoë Heller

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you’re a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don’t know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.[/b]

Sheba being considerably younger and a dead ringer for Cate Blanchett.

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

No, really, that’s all it takes.

…what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there’s nothing left.

True, but only in real life.

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.

Either that or be convinced you don’t mind at all.

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Or, rather, that’s what he convinced humself.

…elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid…

Unlike, for example, intelligence.

[b]Ted Chiang

My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn’t be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole.[/b]

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent.

On the other hand, try having one without the other.

Dividing a number by zero doesn’t produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally “undefined.”

Lots of definers here, right? Sic it.

Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh’s work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh’s work was indicated, and Yahweh’s work was concealed.

He means our Yahweh, not yours.

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I’m glad it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

No dumber than some of the posts here though.

Their devotion had never been put to any serious test, and might not have withstood one; their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.

That doesn’t surprise you, right?

[b]Mark Manson

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.[/b]

Indeed, and who is more avoided here than me?

In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.

Me? Too close to call.

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

And lots of folks avoid me here, don’t they?

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

On the other hand, fuck nature.

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Right, and how hard can that be?

Because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life fucks us.

Trust me: It will fuck you anyway.

[b]God

What happens after you die is pretty funny actually.[/b]

I’ll let you know if that’s true. You know, if I can.

Abortion should only be permitted in cases of rape, incest, and when the woman chooses it.

Which then begs the question: Do the unborn dead go to Heaven?

If I had to pinpoint an exact moment when it all went wrong, I’d say Creation.

Not including Himself one suspects.

Just because the person on the other side of the argument is completely wrong doesn’t mean you aren’t also completely wrong.

He must spend a lot of time here then.

I love you unconditionally under certain circumstances.

Not unlike all the rest of us.

Happy birthday to President Trump, who is a fucking piece of shit.

I guess He shouldn’t have created him then.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

…what’s the point of a promise anyway? How can we expect people to stick to their word about anything when the world around us is so arbitrary, unreliable, and senseless?[/b]

Remember when that wasn’t true? Nope, me neither.

When Teddy died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything.

Today, of course, that’s just a fact of life.

You can be sorry about something and not regret it, Evelyn says.

On the other hand, he thought, nothing comes to mind.

We can’t say what we would do in other circumstances. We can only know what we will do with the ones we face.

No, really think that through.

It hurts to care about someone more than they care about themselves.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay.

In other words, some can actually look forward to feeling hollow.

[b]Joni Mitchell

All my battles were with male egos. I’m just looking for equality, not to dominate.[/b]

Of course that’s still around.

The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi’s mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.

I saw Bambi too. But nothing clicked.

All romantics meet the same fate some day. Drunk and cynical and boring someone in some dark cafe.

Either that or in a brightly lit bowling alley.

The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there, either.

Sure, go ahead, see if you can spot it: youtu.be/Wq2jhs19_V8

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn’t like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

Actually, no, it’s not Trump. It’s Dubya.

If you’re smart or rich or lucky
Maybe you’ll beat the laws of man
But the inner laws of spirit
And the outer laws of nature
No man can

Except you, right?

[b]Woody Allen

The only thing standing between me and greatness is me.[/b]

Now of course that means his prick. Just ask Mia and Ronan.

Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God, I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.

For us it’s ILP.

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

Though, at any point in time, everything does.

I’m afraid of the dark, and suspicious of the light.

As he should be.

You’ll live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to.

Thanks for reminding me.

Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.

Of course no one has ever moved on to threeness.

[b]Daniel Kahneman

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.[/b]

And not just peacegirl.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

You wouldn’t think so, would you?

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.

And, no, not just me.

…it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

We’ll need examples of course.

You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.

In fact right now I am typing these words, chewing gum and listening to music.

To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

Well, sure, lots of things should be.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

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
Psychoanalysis: Mother[/b]

Sure, maybe.

Kierkegaard teaches you how to write a tragedy, Beckett teaches you how to write a comedy, and Sartre teaches you how to write a philosophical treatise that people will assume you plagiarized from the internet.

Sure, maybe not.

Philosophy has been all downhill since
Aristotle: Plato
Spinoza: Plato
Locke: Plato
Hume: Plato
Schopenhauer: Plato
Nietzsche: Nietzsche

Either that or uphill.

Russian lit: It’s my father’s fault
French lit: It’s my king’s fault
English lit: It’s my landlord’s fault
American lit: I don’t know who you are, but it’s your fault

As long as it’s never ours, right?

Hegel: Read Kant. Respect Kant. Reject Kant.
Nietzsche: Read Hegel. Laugh out loud. Forget Hegel.
Sartre: Drink some coffee. Check your latest mentions in the newspaper. Find out who Kant and Hegel are.

If only in a parallel universe.

[b]How To Make Your Philosophy Tweet Popular

1. Mention Spinoza or Wittgenstein
2. Complain about Hegel
3. Laud nihilism
4. Type “Nietzsche” and “abyss” in the same sentence
5. Delete it[/b]

Same for posts here, isn’t it?

[b]Edouard Manet

I paint as I feel like painting; to hell with all their studies. [/b]

Well, he was Manet after all.

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.

Or: The city only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.

Black is not a color.

Let’s try to pin this down: colormatters.com/color-and- … ite-colors

The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me… People don’t realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted.

Just out of curiosity, what the hell is he talking about here?

No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.

Imagine if that was true for philosophers too.

This woman’s work is exceptional. Too bad she’s not a man.

What did he mean by this? And what ought he have meant instead?

[b]Edgar Degas

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see. [/b]

Or: philosophy is not what you think but what you must make others think.

Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.

Or: philosophizing is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

Any bores here?

The true traveler never arrives.

Great, he thought, one more thing I’m doing wrong.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

Of course we all know that for most of us it’s the other way around.

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

My guess: not nearly as sinister as it sounds.

[b]Existential Comics

Nietzsche: God is dead.
Everyone: wow cool.
Nietzsche: No, not cool you little shits. Now we have to be God ourselves. Can you replace God? No, because are all a bunch of idiots.
Everyone: oh shit.[/b]

Nietzsche in a nutshell.

Capitalism is quite literally going to destroy the planet in order to make more money for the small percentage of people who own production, so no, I don’t think it is “not perfect, but the best system we can have.”

Let’s vote on this.

British literature: I will die for duty.
French literature: I will die for love.
German literature: I will die for greatness.
Russian literature: Yeah I’m the one that killed the other three guys.

With the same axe as likely as not.

You are on the train, your eyes lock with a beautiful woman sitting across from you. The same thought goes through both of your heads at the exact same time: “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

On the other hand, what if she wasn’t beautiful?

one time i stared into the abyss and i can confirm it was pretty fuckin lame

Okay, but no two abysses are the same.

When a medical company calculates that they could make twice as much money if they charge ten times more for their drug, even though 4/5 people who need it will die because they can’t afford it, that isn’t capitalism getting perverted, that is capitalism perfecting itself.

Sure, why not?

[b]Harlan Coben

Myron lay sprawled next to a knee-knockingly gorgeous brunette clad only in a Class-B-felony bikini, a tropical drink sans umbrella in one hand, the aqua clear Caribbean water lapping at his feet, the sand a dazzling white powder, the sky a pure blue that could only be God’s blank canvas, the sun a soothing and rich as a Swedish masseur with a snifter of cognac, and he was intensely miserable.[/b]

You know, being a nihilist.

Those who believe that we are anything other than animals are blind. All humans are savages. The ones who are well fed are just lazier. They don’t need to kill to get their food. So they dress up and find so-called loftier pursuits that make them believe that they are somehow above it all. Such nonsense. Savages are just hungrier. That was all. You do horrible things to survive. Anyone who believes that they are above that is delusional.

As you might imagine, there’s no chance that I do.

My love for you is like diarrhea, Sunglasses said. I just can’t hold it in.

I’ll bet that didn’t go over well.

Today he was being reminded yet again of the obvious: The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered—shouldn’t the rest of us take notice? But no. To the outside world, Adam looked the same, acted the same, felt the same.

There must be hundreds and hundreds of versions of this.

Some things we pack away, stick in the back of the closet, never expect to see again ― but we can’t quite make ourselves discard them. Like dreams, I guess.

Only bulkier

Those who had easy answers, be they on the right or the left, were always wrong. The world is complex. It is never one-size-fits-all.

I taught him that.

[b]Bob Dylan

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes,
blown out on the trail; hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn,
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give ya shelter from the storm.” [/b]

Ravished in the corn?

Life has its ups and downs, and time has to be your partner. Really, time is your soul mate.

You wonder if he thinks that now?

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

On the other hand, is this cynical enough?

Don’t Ask Me Nothing About Nothing
I Just Might Tell You the Truth

I just might listen.

Don’t get up gentlemen
I’m only passing through

Wouldn’t you just love the chance to say that?

In songs, you have to tell people about something they didn’t see and weren’t there for, and you have to do it as if you were.

Anyone here ever try to?

[b]Leonard Cohen

In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again! [/b]

But then winter always comes back around again. Still, point taken.

Some people are graced with a flow; some people are graced with something less than a flow. I’m one of those.

I’m neither one of course.

Don’t call yourself a secret unless you mean to keep it.

Nope, never called myself that.

I’m never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.

If only from the womb to the tomb.

Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don’t own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

You know the one…
youtu.be/svitEEpI07E
youtu.be/F3WOAqtRRvQ

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

Stuff you get from poets, right?

[b]tiny nietzsche

I’m not always sad. sometimes I’m ambivalent[/b]

I’m always ambivalent myself.

doesn’t matter. I probably don’t exist anyway

And then one day, oh my, you definitely don’t

the myth of syphilis

Or, sure, maybe not.

I tried to google something in my mind and apparently that’s not a thing yet

Let’s make it one.

we’re on the good ship go fuck yourself

We are the good ship go fuck yourself.

it’s hard to write a memoir when you’ve intentionally blocked everything out

Making it all the easier for us to read.

[b]Neal Stephenson

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America’s like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.[/b]

Let’s just say it’s probably not completely wrong.

This “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

Well, at least until they started drafting them. And the fragging commensed.
You know where.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

Memes as some call them.

This Snow Crash thing–is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?
Juanita shrugs. What’s the difference?

Here it might even be a philosophy.

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Hell, I was almost one of them myself.

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

Let’s make sense of this.

[b]Michelangelo Antonioni

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. [/b]

Let’s cite a few examples.

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

You know, being generous.

Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.

Hell, I could have told you that.

I simply know what the actor’s attitude should be and what he should say. He doesn’t, because he can’t see the relationship that begins to exist between his body and the other things in the scene.

On the other hand, tell them that.

Violence is not the only means of persuasion.

Until it is.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

What they get however is freedom dictated to them by the director and the script.

[b]tiny nietzsche

victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. hear that, victory? your mother’s a whore[/b]

That is one way to look at it.

you know, I’m something of a nihilist myself

A dilenttante nihilist? Don’t be fooled.

I’ve always relied on the disillusionment of postmodernism

Sure, go ahead, rely on it yourself.

always be deleting

Unless of course [like here] they won’t let you.

your mom is the most important meal of the day

Try not to take that the wrong way.

I got tested for postmodernism. the results were inconclusive

I scored a 100 myself.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

She had lived long enough to learn that families didn’t dissolve or reconfigure neatly, but left debris lying everywhere, and it was human debris. And sometimes, like tonight, she felt as if she were tripping over the bodies.[/b]

Debris. That’s me alright.

She’d believed in forever in her twenties, when Gray had said it, meaning every word, and she’d believed in forever in her thirties, when William had said it, lying through his teeth. But she’d lived long enough to know that forever couldn’t be guaranteed to anyone. Even tomorrow couldn’t be relied upon.

And then, eventually, any minute now.

Don’t think on what they say, because you don’t have to get yourself right with them. You have to get yourself right with you.

You know, if you’re still foolish enough to believe you can.

…life wouldn’t be as much fun if we knew where its treasures were hidden. Sometimes you had to search for them. Sometimes you had to fight for them. And sometimes, they were at your feet.

Like fun is the point of it.

Celebrities are our heroes and heroines now, discussed the next day over latte or lunch. We have such a strong need to talk to each other, to have some commonality of story, that we’re finding it in celebrities. In effect, we’re turning reality into fiction. Using actors and actresses, just off duty. And how is this working for us? Not great. It leaves us with a perennially empty feeling. We find the celebrities empty, and at some level, we find ourselves empty for paying them so much attention.

I know, he thought, let’s change that.

See the child, not the cancer. Then you’ll be happy when you visit, not sad.

Just don’t expect this to always work.