a thread for mundane ironists

[b]John Updike

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. [/b]

How fucking idiotic is that?! But, sure, just for the hell of it, point taken.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Easter eggs too.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

On the other hand, doesn’t everyone?

Government is an illusion the governed should not encourage.

Especially now, right? :laughing: :wink: :laughing:

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?

Even if that is exactly the case, right?

It’s not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

If, of course, even that’s up to us.

[b]so sad today

i bet i’m doing the pandemic wrong[/b]

It kills you, for example.

treat everyone with kindness but also try to avoid everyone

Six feet at least. Like we’re doing here.

just want whatever is going to kill me to kill me instantaneously without a doctor ever saying “it’s going to kill you”

A bullet in the brain ought to do it.

i have two modes: anxious or asleep

Not counting the nightmares of course.

need a quarantine for my mind

“Come in, he said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”
Him though, not me.

the kids i didn’t have are very thankful

And the one I had?

[b]Douglas Adams

Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.[/b]

Or, sure, not funny at all.

Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.

One of those sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t things.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Especially now, right?

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

At least we don’t have that to worry about. Or I certainly don’t.

Ok, he said, I don’t like to disturb you at what I know must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to know first of all if you actually realize that this is a difficult and distressing time for you.

That’s always tricky.

Believe me, it is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you’re innocent than to languish in a cell hoping that the police—who already think you’re guilty—will find it for you.

You’d think that would be obvious.

[b]Brent Weeks

I’m going to explain this to you in terms you can understand: shut up.[/b]

Wouldn’t work with you, right Kid?

Do you know what you can do to an enemy but not to a friend? Stab her in the back.

Remember when that was always true?

They were deeply in love. Smitten. At their age. Sad.

At any age, he insisted.

More choices in a limited time didn’t mean didn’t mean you could do everything-it meant that you could do anything, so you probably did nothing, frozen with indecision.

Let’s decide if we can decide if that’s still true.

Fock eww.

Tripping up the censors?

Politics is ethics writ large.

He means writ small of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Socrates[/b]

And then the part about tumbling over into the abyss that is oblivion.

“He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.” Friedrich Nietzsche

You can’t win, can you?!

“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Or, here, you can stick with the general description intellectual contraptions.

“An infected mind is a far more dangerous pestilence than any plague—one only threatens your life, the other destroys your character.” Marcus Aurelius

Starting with, well, you know.

“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses her job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.” Harry S. Truman

Boy, is that on the way back.

“Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.” John Updike

Not counting all the ones that don’t come true of course.

[b]Jenny Offill

For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she’d suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again.[/b]

You hear that, right?

Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live.

I think I understand this.

My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

Oh, there’s such a thing, alright.

Are animals lonely?
Other animals, I mean.

Let’s ask them.

Something in her past that makes her want to tear things to shreds.

Or even thinking about something in the future.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.

In other words, if you can.

[b]Max Born

Physics as we know it will be over in six months.[/b]

I know: When did he say it?
Of course, that’s not the point, is it?

It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, “rest.” We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial “door-nail,” say, is actually forever in motion. We have merely become accustomed to judge by outward appearances; by the deceptive impressions we get through our senses.

Right, like that will change how we describe them.

We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.

Not counting the dead stuff.

It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.

:laughing:

No language which lends itself to visualization can describe quantum jumps.

You know, now that James is gone.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

Any age, actually.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.” Niccolo Machiavelli[/b]

Come on, Kids, own up to it.

“Is it the fault of wine if a fool drinks it and goes stumbling into darkness?” Avicenna

Next up: Is it the fault of coronavirus…

“Strangely enough, I received more inspiration from literature than from actual, naked life.” Günter Grass

Strangely enough indeed.
On the other hand, for some, here: “Strangely enough, I received more inspiration from philosophy than from actual, naked life.”

“We become what we think about all day long.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anyone here that explains?

"Don’t stumble over something behind you.” Seneca the Younger

Well, if you know what he means.

"If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” Seneca the Younger

Well, if you know what he means.

[b]Guy de Maupassant

She was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies.[/b]

Of course back in the 19th century this takes on a whole other meaning.
Right?

I said, ‘If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn’t we meet them a long time ago?’

On the other hand, they’re thinking the same thing about us.

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

In other words, they think they do.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

Two words: actual options.

For a number of years he had lived, eaten, laughed, loved, hoped, like everyone else. And for him it was over, over for good. A life! A few days, and then nothing! You’re born, you grow up, you’re happy, you wait, then you die. Goodbye! Man or woman, you’ll never return to this earth! And yet each of us bears within him the fierce, unrealizable longing for eternity, each of us is a kind of universe within the universe, and each of us soon vanishes completely into the dunghill of new organisms. Plants, animals, men, stars, worlds, everything quickens, then dies, in order to transform itself. And nothing ever returns, whether insect, man, or planet!

Go ahead, fit yourself in there somewhere.

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.

Right, like words on paper can’t in turn aim to con us.

[b]Primo Levi

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.[/b]

The Trump droids, for example. Though you may have your own example.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

Or, here, posts.

I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.

And that’s before we get to the banality part.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

I beg to differ. At least on occasion.

Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.

True, but trust me: there are consequences.

Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.

We’ve got a few of them here.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Nathaniel Hawthorne[/b]

Always important to bring this one back.
[size=50]Not counting me of course. [/size]

“The politicians are there to make you think you have a choice, you don’t have a choice.” George Carlin

Now you can choose whether to believe it.

“Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.” Rudolf Carnap

That and intellectual contraptions. More or less logical.

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.” Don DeLillo

3,801 cases and counting.

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.” Maximilien Robespierre

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Joker.

“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.” Theodor W. Adorno

Sounds like something he would say. Does it sound like something you would believe?

[b]Erwin Schrodinger

Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world…Nature does not act by purposes.[/b]

You can take that to the bank. Then to the grave.
Unless of course he’s wrong.

This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole… Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon mother earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.

:laughing:

Well, in all likelihood.

The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.

My guess: this will never be brought down to earth.

The essential feature of statistics is a prudent and systematic ignoring of details.

Prudent? Someone explain that please.

If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.

Not counting the Turds here of course.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

I was just now not thinking that myself.

[b]Lily King

The story you think you know is never the real one.[/b]

Come on, sometimes it is.

But I don’t trust crowds - hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain, find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is exactly my point.

Let’s create a collective brain here! Not counting mine of course.

Funny how when you have a purpose the misery goes and hides.

Funny if it were actually true perhaps.

She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic.

In other words, they become objectivists.

Can we have one day when we don’t have to talk about the meaning of life?
I don’t think we ever talk about anything else.

Why on earth would they?

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

Using language to point it out of course…

[b]Nein

The good news: hope has been found. The bad news: it doesn’t want to get anywhere near us.[/b]

And what hope might that be, he challenged.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was, at best, not yet the very worst of the very, very, very worst of times.

My advice: Double it. At least.

We regret to inform you. There is no shortage of doctors of philosophy.

Except here, perhaps.

Sorry, society. Your contract has expired.

The one with nature.

Nihilism. Because nothing’s funny.

You’ll never catch me believing that. Here, for example.

1. Don’t panic.
2. Don’t panic.
3. Start learning German online from quarantine.
4. Panic.

Or, now, English.

[b]Asger Jorn

A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible.[/b]

A novel virus.

Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc … It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.

Not counting the times it makes all the difference in the world.

Everything is in constant flux, from state to state, from good to bad and back again…only in transmutation, perpetual motion, lies truth.

It’s best to keep that one up in the clouds, eh?

The significance of something lies in its presence here and now. I don’t care what it has been or what it will become. It is the experience of things that matters, the confrontation with things.

Generally speaking as it were.

The act of expressing oneself is a physical one. It materializes the thought.

Let’s file this one immediately under, “for better or worse”.

The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics.

Some people actually get paid to think thoughts like this. :wink:

[b]John Updike

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.[/b]

Why not me, he asked.

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

Fucking intellectuals, he thought.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

Fucking intellectuals, he thought.

People go around mourning the death of God; it’s the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren’t people any more, they’re just ssoul-less sheep.

Sssounds about rrright.

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys

Clever enough for you?

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

Next up: the second time.

[b] Elena Epaneshnik

An optimist: The glass is half full!
A pessimist: Yeah, but have you got it tested?[/b]

Or, in Trumpworld, CAN you get it tested?

Looks like we’re only a few steps away from making toilet paper, face masks and hand sanitizers a new global currency.

Let me guess: Supply and demand?

Love like there’s nothing else to do. Because there isn’t.

Except what we’re doing here of course.

Well, if anything, we no longer have to read Monday Motivation tweets. What’s better - we don’t even have to have Mondays for a while. Or any other weekdays.

Like the weekends are any different.

These days, reading the news or blogs, my first thought is that we simply must invent a vaccine against stupidity.

Their stupidity first of course.

Say something sexy in French?
Ils ont trouvé un remède contre le Covid-19.

How about a cure for stupidity?

[b]Douglas Adams

Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next.[/b]

I guess we’ll never know though.

Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Mr. Spock.

…something almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea…

Just not at Starbucks.

He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.

Or, sure, fuck that part.

If there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.

Yeah, why not? We’ve got one of them running things right here in America.

Imagine he said, never even thinking, ‘We are alone,’ simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there’s any other way to be.

Imagining it yet?

[b]Brent Weeks

A whore’s truth has too many sharp edges.[/b]

Ouch, he concurred.

If you’re trapped in the darkness all alone, how do you know you’re alone and not actually surrounded by an army of friends, also silent, also afraid in the dark, merely waiting for the sound of one voice to rouse them from fear, to fight for freedom?

Trust me, I know.

It’s easier to build a new culture on the graves of the dead than around the homes of the living.

We’ll need some actual examples of course.

Some say, ‘Who you are is what you do.’ They’re wrong, but not all wrong. What you do forms who you are. Then who you are forms what you do. It’s a vicious cycle, or a virtuous one, depending. One act doesn’t undo all of who you are, but a thousand acts make you who you are. So it’s simple, though not easy: stop creating the wrong you.

Any wrong yous here? And I’m off the hook, right?

Everyone thinks they’re special. It’s what makes lying so easy.

Especially when, increasingly, the truth no longer even matters. And not just Republicans.

They made it so that we can’t change it from within. They made it so we must kill to break it.

Among other things, “the system”.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

We were given perhaps a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to do what we’re best at: staying at home, eating, drinking, and procrastinating. Let’s not screw this up. Please.[/b]

I never do myself.

For those who ostentatiously tweet about going to restaurants, not washing their hands, and telling us COVID-19 is a hoax - it’ll be great to lose Internet connection every time they want to tweet about how stupid they are. Idiocy can also become pandemic.

Hell, here in America, it’s the new national pastime.
With baseball gone.

There’s just one thing that we know for sure: Schrödinger’s cat will survive the COVID-19. Dead or alive.

Or dead and alive.

If it weren’t for misunderstandings, we wouldn’t talk to each other at all.

Here we call that posting.

Social distancing within a family: what can possibly go wrong?

Anyone here actually know?

Cassandra said there’d be days like these.

Then weeks. Then months.