a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Michelangelo Antonioni

Today we no longer know what to call art, what its function is and even less what function it will have in the future. We know only that it is something dynamic - unlike many ideas that have governed us.[/b]

Let’s thank the serious philosophers for that.

Ingmar Bergman is a long way from me, but I admire him. He, too, concentrates a great deal on individuals; and although the individual is what interests him most, we are very far apart. His individuals are very different from mine; his problems are different from mine - but he’s a great director.

Less I and Thou and more me and we.

Take Einstein; wasn’t he looking for something stable and changeless in this enormous, constantly changing melting pot that is the universe? He sought fixed rules. Today, instead, it would be helpful to find all those rules that show how and why the universe is not fixed - how this dynamism develops and acts. Then maybe we will be able to explain many things, perhaps even art, because the old instruments of judgment, the old aesthetics, are no longer of any use to us - so much so that we no longer know what’s beautiful and what isn’t.

Unless of course nothing is not determined.

Do you really think a man must be strong, masculine, dominating, and the woman frail, obedient and sensitive? This is a conventional idea. Reality is quite different.

And getting more so everyday.

Fitzgerald said a very interesting thing in his diary; that human life proceeds from the good to the less good - that is, it’s always worse as you go on. That’s true.

And getting more so everyday.

I can’t imagine love without a sexual charge.

Not counting his pets perhaps.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

If I stopped talking after I made my point, I’d never say anything.[/b]

How clever is that? No, really?

…she wondered if justice was possible in a world full of profoundly evil and damaged human beings, in a veritable universe of damage.

I once wondered that too. In fact, I still do. But not you, right?

I’m always interested in products that claim to be aphrodisiacs, when we all know that the one and only aphrodisiac is a man volunteering to build you some bookshelves.

Men. The jokes are always on them these days.

…if you ask me, law leads to order, not necessarily justice.

Yeah, but that’s necessarily true.

How can litigation not be adversarial? That’s the fun part.

You know, for some of us.

We’re here and we prey on you. We target you. We groom you.

Them too.

[b]Ani DiFranco

One of my rules is: Never try to do anything. Just do it. [/b]

You know, if you actually can.

They taught me different was wrong.

Of course we all know that sometimes they are right.

We are taught to view pain as an enemy, not a teacher. But pain is the right hand of growth and transformation. Pain is in the history of all human wisdom.

Trust me: Not all pain.

We barely have time to react in this world, let alone rehearse.

We’ll need a context of course.

Words are hotter than flames. Words are wetter than water.

We’ll need a context of course.

I don’t take good pictures 'cause I have the kind of beauty that moves.

You tell me.

[b]Zoe Heller

I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn’t feeling particularly reverent about my mother’s deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, ‘You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’ approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn’t.[/b]

This either sinks in [eventually] or it doesn’t.

Meir, let me ask you something, I said after a while.
Sure.
Do you think I’m a bad person?
Only God knows that for sure, Willy.
So you don’t have an opinion at all?
Not one that really matters.
Okay, let me ask you something else. If the Polish peasant who hid Jews from the Nazis is a hero, what is the Polish peasant who turned the Jews away? Is he a coward?
Meir smiled, Of course.
Really? A coward? A bad man?
A coward isn’t a bad man, necessarily. You can’t know if you’re a bad man until you die.
You’ve got to wait until you hear god’s decision?
Well, yes, that’s true. But I meant something else. Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good. Until then, there is always the possibility of turning yourself around.

Religion in a nutshell. If not your nutshell.

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.

Of course she says this everyday.

It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.

If not outright embarrassing.

One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they’re simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren’t they?

So, when did you stop pretending?

I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

And she means it.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Abraham Lincoln wrestled with depression, but that did not stop him from committing the United States to landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely back to earth.[/b]

You know, in a parallel universe.

It is important to live alone, and go to therapy, until you recover your authentic self, which, as we all know, does not exist.

He got that from me. If it’s not the other way around.

The American $1.7T student debt bubble was the end in itself, all along. Higher education is an adjunct of global finance.

You don’t get this, do you?

So I was teaching George Plimpton how to direct Kinski, but we never got past the instructions in the use of firearms, amyl nitrate, and Hershey bars.

Can you say that?

Marvel Comics should pay reparations for the harm they have done to American cinema.

True, but there isn’t enough money in the world. And we’re still stuck with all the idiots that watch them.

You think many things, and most of them are wrong.

He means everyone of course.

[b]Ted Chiang

We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because it helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.[/b]

Of course we know how far one can take this.

Their righteousness could not save them from the consequences of their deeds.

Hell, even you might learn this someday.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks—call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex—and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you’re no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You’ve got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

Fine, but I’m sticking with “in the eye of the beholder”.

He had come to visit every day, even though she refused to see him at first, so that he wouldn’t be absent when she did want to see him.

Never could do that sort of thing myself.

If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

Let’s actually make this applicable to something.

Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

Technically, as it were.

[b]Mark Manson

Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with “romance” in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it![/b]

What was Shakespeare thinking!

Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.

Let’s refute this. You know, just for the hell of it.

But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.

You know, if they have any.

If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.

Uh, not always?

No matter where you go, there’s a five-hundred-pound load of shit waiting for you. And that’s perfectly fine. The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.

Actually, I haven’t found mine yet.

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that’s likely to save the planet one day.

That’s worked for you, right?

[b]Werner Twertzog

Showing, once again, that, no, you cannot “get anything you want,” at Alice’s Restaurant.[/b]

I thought that burned down.

In your eyes I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. So, your place or mine?

Hey, a fuck is a fuck.

The Silent Majority typically supports genocide, as we all know.

Well, we all know now.

Listen to me: Climate change is not a “hoax.” But, on the other hand, it is important for human civilization to end, so that life on earth may flourish once again in several million years.

Having it both ways always works for me.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Also bad intentions. All intentions lead to hell. Intend nothing.

Don’t even think about it.

It is important to take your children to Disney World to teach them that they will never be happy.

You know, if you can afford to. And, if not, there are plenty of alternatives.

[b]Jennifer Weiner

They say - “they” being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can’t just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times.[/b]

Not unlike with a Pepsi machine.

When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforcement. Put three groups of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter how often they pressed. And the third group got pellets just once in a while. The first group, the professor said, eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward and the rats who never get treats give up, too. But the random rats will press on that bar forever, hoping each time they press that this time the magic will happen, that this time they’ll get lucky. It was at that moment in class that I realized that I had become my father’s rat.

So, whose rat are you?

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Imagine then if she writes philosophy.

The way I see it, she began, your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids. She said “you kids” in precisely the same tone I would have used for “you infestation of cockroaches”.

Or, worse, bedbugs.

If there had been an exercise I’d liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?

Probably.

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” Mexican Proverb

Like that would actually matter to them.

[b]Woody Allen

There’s no way to prove that there is no God. You just have to take it on faith.[/b]

The other side of the coin as it were.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

Topped only by ritual.

All things are possible, except skiing through a revolving door.

My guess: There’s a video on youtube of someone doing it…naked

Let’s say there was no terrorism whatsoever and we were all very nice to one another and we were all kind, we still would be faced with an extremely cruel and hostile universe and existence and so I’m a great pessimist and I feel that it’s impossible really to be happy, and that the best you can hope for is to be distracted.

What I would call an optimist.

Geez, I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I’m never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts.

You know, philosophically.

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it’s because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it’s still better than skipping through a meadow.

Of course it does help to be rich and famous. Even skipping through a meadow.