a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Zoë Heller

It’s similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you’d kill it…[/b]

Though [hopefully] you never actually do.

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.

My own sign was different. But point taken.

It’s always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn’t bad. It’s a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It’s just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that’s inside.

Must be millions and millions who have gone there.

I’m a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

Nothing childish about that, right?

In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.

It didn’t deny it to her though. Well, if you’re inclined to see her that way.

There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.

Or, for some, not in the least perverse.

[b]so sad today

sorry to hear about your positive attitude[/b]

But don’t let it happen again.

wanna come over and not exist together

Actually, why don’t you come over and not exist together here.

is this nauseous feeling life or death

Yes.

cause of death: your positive attitude

No, that’s a real thing.

positive thinking won’t change the fact that we’re going to die

Unless you positively want to.

i’m tired of being brave and i’m not even brave

It’s actually harder than it sounds.

Do one of Oscar Wilde, dude.

[b]Ted Chiang

She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe. [/b]

Anyone here know for sure?

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that.

Close enough?

The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

You know, being an Uberman.

A twinkle appeared in Gary’s eyes. ‘I’ll bet I know what you’re talking about.’ He snipped a potsticker in half with his chopsticks. ‘You’re used to thinking of refraction in terms of cause and effect: reaching the water’s surface is the cause, and the change in direction is the effect. But Fermat’s principle sounds weird because it describes light’s behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: “Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.”

Nope, no twinkle in mine, he thought. Thou has nothing to do with it.

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Not unlike history for everyone else. Written down or not.

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

As you might well imagine, that would be completely lost on this explorer.

[b]Mark Manson

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.[/b]

Is this as idiotic as I think it is? Or as brilliant as you think it is?

Don’t hope for a life without problems, the panda said. There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.

On the other hand, name one.

Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.

Being right too.

You cannot be a powerful and life-changing presence to some people without being a joke or an embarrassment to others.

Let’s prove this.

Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone. It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you.

Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

That and being indifferent.

Been there, done that: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179454&p=2364884&hilit=oscar+wilde#p2364884

We’re psychically linked, biggs. Two seconds before you posted that last one earlier, I had written:

“Why you gotta be like that, man? I swear to god (or his absence thereof) that if you don’t do one on Oscar Wilde, I’ll never read another one of your posts as long as I philosophize”

… and presto. You beat me by a matter of seconds.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

I think I’m heading into a time in my life where words and labels will lose their meaning. It will only be the intent behind them that will matter.[/b]

Not that anyone will ever grasp it.

I punched someone in the library stacks, somewhere between 972.01 and 973.6

That’s between “Mexico, Central America, West Indies, Bermuda” and the “United States”

She liked to ignore the fact that I had made love to men and enjoyed it. She liked to ignore it until the very moment she decided to be threatened by it. That seemed to be her pattern. I was a lesbian when she loved me and a straight woman when she hated me.

Sounds about right. Well, for someone who knows absolutely nothing about it.

You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore.

My guess: Somewhere between birth and death.

The truth often lies, unclaimed, in the middle.

Our own truth as often as not.

Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

It takes practice though. Few of us are naturals.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Language transcends us and yet we speak.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty[/b]

Well, it is, after all, a biological imperative.

“Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.” Karl Barth

Otherwise known as blind faith.

“All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?” Buddha

And this guy is revered?!

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut

If only until the day we die.

“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” Thucydides

Wow, that can’t be good.

“Ignorance is bold, and knowledge is reserved.” Thucydides

Sure, they had Kids back then too.

[b]Joni Mitchell

Some turn to Jesus and some turn to heroin.[/b]

If not the other way around.

The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil.

At least until Christ died for his sins.

Nietzsche was a hero, especially with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He gets a bad rap; he’s very misunderstood. He’s a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

Well, I guess that settles that, right?

Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.

Isn’t that when the White House went Hollywood?

That’s one thing that’s always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that’s it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ You know? He painted it and that was it.

He wondered: is this important to know?

I don’t know how to sell out. If I tried to sell out I don’t think I could.

He wondered then if she ever did.

[b]Jennifer Weiner

I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you’re not married or coupled up, whether you’ve been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.[/b]

Another liberal, right?

I don’t trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.

Why trust any emotion at all, he thought.

Love, I said, is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I’m not going to be a sucker ever again.

You know, being optimistic.

You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.

Remember when that was actually true?

The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It’s the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.

Who cares if it’s true?

Found, I told myself. Try to get found.

How is that different from, say, trying not to get lost?

[b]Woody Allen

If you’re born with a gift, to behave like it’s an achievement is not right.[/b]

And he should know.

Eternity is really long, especially near the end.

Has anyone ever actually made it that far?

My relationship with death remains the same—I’m strongly against it.

Let’s see if that will make a difference.

I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me.

He hates it in other words.

Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?

Because nature either compels us to or not.

If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

Or here: If my posts make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

[b]Daniel Kahneman

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.[/b]

Priming studies? Still, it does have that “ring of truth”.

…a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.

Probably explains why I’ve never had one, he thought.

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

In other words, here, dasein is just understood.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

In other words, here, dasein is just understood.

As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

I know, let’s bring this down to earth.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Depending on, well, you know what.

[b]Edgar Degas

If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.[/b]

This might even have an explanation.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

This might even have an explanation.

He once said that he wished to be famous, but unknown.

Maybe famous to a very few, but unknown to a staggering many?

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

And probably your art too.

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

One more really dumb thing an artist has said. It is dumb, right?

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

Sounds like it might be important to know.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.” Gabriel Marcel[/b]

Most aren’t even in the general vicinity today.

“The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.” Gabriel Marcel

Imagine him here then.

“I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.” Edmund Husserl

Like you, right?

“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” Voltaire

Multiplied at least a thousandfold today, right? And not just in Trumpworld.

“Nothing is so sure as the final oblivion.” Pär Lagerkvist

Or so inscrutable.

“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.” Confucius

Well, unless the superior man is also a narcissistic asshole.

[b]Harlan Coben

Oh, you’ve made plenty of short stories long. But never, ever, have you made a long story short.[/b]

I know the type.

Acceptance of the inevitable, a sign of a wise man.

Not counting life or death of course.

The Bad Man isn’t lurking in playgrounds, kiddies. He lives in your house.

And, every once in a while, the Bad Woman.

It was true what they said: The older you become, the more you are like your parents. Soon he’d be telling a kid not to stick his elbow out the car window or he’d lose it.

There are, of course, worse things to tell him.

Death sucks. Death sucks, mostly because it forces those who stay behind to survive. Death isn’t merciful enough to take you too. Instead, death constantly jams down your throat the awful lesson that life does indeed go on, no matter what.

In other words, life sucks too.

Man plans and God laughs.

That all started in the Garden of Eden.

[b]Bob Dylan

You have to know that you’re the best whether anybody else tells you that or not. And that you’ll be around, in one way or another, longer than anybody else. Somewhere inside of you, you have to believe that. [/b]

Of course it helps like him to actually be the best.

A cat’s meow and cow’s moo, I can recite them all.

Even those from foreign lands.

Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter

In other words, “it’s life and life only”.

If there’s an original thought out there, I could use one right now.

Let’s invite him here!

Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
‘I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,’ I said that.

Imagine then what Trump would say.

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.

Unless you do it on purpose. Though, sure, even then sometimes.

[b]Nein

How to make a summer reading list:

1. Think of all the books you want to read.
2. Wait until summer.
3. Think of all the books you could have read.[/b]

Repeat in Fall, Winter and Spring.

Save the world. Delete a tweet.

Not likely to work in all locations.

I’m just here to see how it all ends.

Nope, not so far.

We regret to inform you that in German they spell it Sommer. With an o. Just to fuck with u.

Not only that, but they capitalize Dasein.

A gentle reminder that a RT is not an endorsement. It’s the first step in the construction and instrumentalization of a false yet politically potent aura that ends in fascism.

Russian Television? Rotten Tomatoes? A little help here please.

I never met a serotonin inhibitor that I didn’t selectively re-uptake.

Also, a little help here too.

[b]Leonard Cohen

I want to be paid for my work, not work for my pay. [/b]

Unlike, say, the rest of us.

I don’t trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go.

I’m still flipping a coin myself.

I think that really what our training, what our culture, our religious institutions, our educational and cultural institutions should be about is preparing the heart for that journey outside of the cage of the ribs.

Just don’t expect that to actually mean anything.

Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation — none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy.

Just don’t expect that to actually mean anything.

I’m planning a catastrophe.

If not anymore.

The big change is the proximity to death.

I hear that.

[b]Neal Stephenson

The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.[/b]

For some of course one is all it will take.

…this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You’re in this place. There’s other people all around you, but they don’t understand you and you don’t understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

Actually, it’s closer to 98% of us.

Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn’t get any work done.

Like that’s a problem, right?

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

And even then only if you’re lucky.

I beg your pardon? Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.

Not counting the Brits here, of course.

She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that’s partly why they love me, and partly why they leave.

At least it makes sense.