a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Colum McCann

It’s about fear. You know! They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are… Bits of it floating in the air. It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down, covering everything. You’re breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in it. It’s everywhere. What I mean is, we’re afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we’ve stopped to take account of it, we’d just fall into despair. But we can’t stop. We’ve for to keep going.[/b]

Next up: It’s about anxiety.

Literature can remind us that not all ife is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

Millions of them, for example.

Goodness is more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love.

Cue iambiguous.

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

Like me, for example.

She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

Moi? Toss me in the nearest dumpster.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

Baltimore too. Or so I’m told.

[b]John Lydon

I have one major problem with the Internet: It’s full of liars.[/b]

Them and Kids.

Just because people think politically different to you doesn’t mean they’re inhuman.

On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that they’re not either.

Music can describe emotions far more accurately than words ever can. As soon as I realised that, I knew music was where I wanted to be.

That’s so true. And no one still knows why.

I’m just permanently agitated by everything and everyone.

Again: Genes or memes?

You’d have to be daft as a brush to say you didn’t like Pink Floyd.

Let alone King Crimson.

I cannot comprehend fundamentalism. It’s fundamentally wrong.

Either that or fundamentally ironic.

[b]Simon Critchley

There are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment. Religious disappointment flows from the realization that religious belief is not an option for us. Political disappointment flows from the fact that there is injustice - that we live in a world that is radically unjust and violent, where might seems to equal right, where the poor are exploited by the rich, etc. [/b]

In other words, the latter without the former…one without the other.

Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already.

Tell that to these guys: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=195731

The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program.

Anarchy in New York. What could possibly go wrong?
Yo, Snake Plisskin!

I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case.

You know, in his head.

If I had a religious experience, what I know for sure is that I would stop doing philosophy and would start doing religion…

Me? Well, for one thing, depending on what the experience actually was.

The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic.

Fuck you, if we don’t need a context here.

[b]so sad today

annoyed that i had to be born and annoyed that i have to die[/b]

Much like the rest of us.

i’m thrilled to announce that i didn’t do shit today

Me too. Unless you count this.

somehow your fakeness seems different than my fakeness

Less genuine for one thing.

can’t tell if i’m losing it or i’ve lost it

can’t tell if i’m finding it or i’ve found it.

so you think you can go a day without overthinking

Here? Is that even possible?

i keep meaning to be a different person

Check with me tomorrow.

[b]A. S. Byatt

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.[/b]

Not unlike, say, Buddhism.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

In other words, “I” becomes a story that we tell to others. And to ourselves.

An odd phrase, “by heart,” he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

Here? “By head”.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

See, I told you.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

Or: I think there are a lot more important things than philosophy in the world. But not to you.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

You know, before the internet.

[b]so sad today

i don’t need to sleep forever just for 1000 years[/b]

I’ll settle for a few days myself.

i’m starting to think that feelings are just going to keep happening

Cue “the other side”?

i feel overwhelmed and i’m not even doing anything

Like thinking doesn’t count?

the dopamine giveth and the dopamine taketh away

Just ask Leonard Lowe.

are we dead?

Sort of, he thought.

i mean, fuck everything kind of

Fine, but let’s narrow it down.

[b]Karl Kraus

Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden.[/b]

As well they should be!

Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?

On the other hand, who among us hasn’t?

I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.

Well, sort of, I suppose.

The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

Here? Shall I name names?

I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.

Here? Shall I name names?

Lord, forgive them, for they know what they do!

Like the Lord gives a shit. Given history to date, say.

[b]Penelope Lively

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.[/b]

How civilized!

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

Though not objectively one suspects.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

The concerns of non-fiction too.

In old age, you realise that while you’re divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will.

Among other things, the bitterest of truths.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

Nothing it is then.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Cue 1] contingency 2] chance and 3] change.
Though not necessarily in that order.

[b]sad socrates

The internet has proved that gods and dogs are equally dumb.[/b]

Dogs? Something I missed, perhaps?

Things aren’t getting worse, they are getting more human.

Well, how much worse can that be? If only on this planet.

I’m too young to laugh.

Besides, he thought, why on earth would anyone want to?

Thank you for misunderstanding.

Yo, Larry! Yo, Moe! Yo, Curly!

Ingesting existential thoughts can kill anything that lives.

That and a whole slew of viruses.

I don’t even believe my name is Socrates.

Besides, he just plays him on Twitter.

[b]Austin Osman Spare

Darken your room, shut the door, empty your mind. You are still in great company.[/b]

No, not counting you, Kid.

In a universe that defies description, all systems of belief can only be false.

See, I told you!

I am God, and all other gods are my imagery. I gave birth to myself. I am millions of forms excreating; eternal; and nothing exists except through me; yet I am not them they serve me.

Bullshit. How can he be God, when I am?

The more Chaotic I am, the more complete I am.

Come on, chaos is the last word that one would capitalize.

In our solitariness…great depths are sometimes sounded. Truth hideth in company.

He learned that here.

And remember, you shall suffer all things and again suffer: until you have sufficient sufferance to accept all things.

Been there, done that.
Only, as you might imagine, it didn’t work.

[b]Nikolai Gogol

I saw that I’d get nowhere on the straight path, and that to go crookedly was straighter.[/b]

What path are we on here?

They don’t listen to me, they don’t hear me, they don’t see me.

Maybe, but I’m chipping away.

How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners.

Uh, a lot?

It’s the most righteous, which of course is not the same thing as the most profitable.

And, I might add, getting less so all the time.

There are people who exist in this world not like entities but like the speckles or spots on something.

Let’s call them, say, the masses.

Whatever you may say, the body depends on the soul.

Let’s finally find the damn thing!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Associate with people who are likely to improve you.” Seneca the Younger[/b]

“Fuck them all!” Seneca the Older

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Oscar Wilde

Anybody here me?

“Words are loaded pistols.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Or, for some here, squirt guns,

“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” Mark Twain

Next up: It’s your job to eat crow.

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” Ernest Hemingway

Let’s explain the reason for that.

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Arthur Schopenhauer

And, believe it or not, these days, every woman.

[b]Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You need a story to displace a story.[/b]

It can even be a true.

The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

That’s how it works alright.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

That’s how it works alright.

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

Let’s change that!

An option hides where we don’t want it to hide.

In plain sight for example.

The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

Examples please.

[b]Iris Murdoch

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.[/b]

Talk about an intellectual contraption!

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don’t know much about goodness.

And that’s only our own rendition of it.

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now…

I know that I do.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

More to the point, the other way around.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

Gee, I wonder why.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

Let’s pretend to.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"You can’t satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied.” Robert Nozick[/b]

Of course he’s just paraphrasing John Galt.

“We can speak and think only of what exists." Parmenides

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage." Anais Anin

Yeah, we want that to be true, sure.

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin

Morally and politically as it were.

“Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.”
Paul Klee

Where’s that leave, say, those soup cans?

“When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.” Hermann Hesse

So, how am I doing so far?

[b]Mikhail Lermontov

What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet. [/b]

What can I say, sure, if this works for you, go for it.

I was modest–they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil–nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy–other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them–but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world–none understood me: and I learned to hate.

It’s all their fault!!

We survive on novelty, so much less demanding than commitment.

What, even philosophers?!

Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.

Uh, let’s at least agree on that?

Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although frequently neither acknowledges the fact to himself.

Or, here, perhaps, the stooge of the other?

I want to reconcile myself with heaven,
I want to love, I want to pray,
I want to believe in good.

Would that he could, I fumed.

[b]Colum McCann

All the lives we could live, all the people we would never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.[/b]

See, I sort of told you.

And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn’t happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening.

In other words, try to keep them to a minimum.

A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines.

Or, sure, he loved men but preferred embroidery.

The overexamined life…it’s not worth living.

Me? Two, three or four hours a day.

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

So, what’s the perfect word for that?

Are you saying I’m a liar?
No I’m just, like, speaking.

Okay, then what happened?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Mark Twain[/b]

For example, you cannot die until you are born.

“There are two great days in a person’s life - the day we are born and the day we discover why.” William Barclay

So, anyone here discover why yet?

“Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.” William Barclay

Uh, philosophy too?

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” John Updike

I know: You’ll take that chance, won’t you?

“Every true genius is bound to be naive.” Friedrich Schiller

About what, you might ask.

“…the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.” George Orwell

All the way to the bank for some.

[b]John Lydon

Meat isn’t murder, it’s delicious.[/b]

Yo, Morrissey! youtu.be/LG3h80g8NhU

The only good political movement I’ve seen lately was Occupy Wall Street. They had no leaders, which was genius. But unfortunately it always ends up with some hippy playing a flute.

Besides, where are they now, he thought.

If dolphins are so intelligent, how come they ain’t got Walkmans?

Let alone shopping malls.

Love is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises.

Or, these day, 3 minutes or more.

Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

Of course here he’s only paraphrasing just about everyone. But especially Bill Barr.

For me, the anarchy movement is hilarious. It’s all under .org, which is of course government sponsored websites, and then they’re all wearing corporate clothing from the Dr. Martin’s to the back sacks and the cell phones, they’re all flying around on corporate jets and using corporate highways. Very anarchistic!

Yo, Chakra Superstar!

[b]Roger Scruton

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.[/b]

What the hell, he thought, why not.

The best evidence of a mind is when you change it.

About what…whether to go bowling?

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.

Me, I’m more into asking others why I should believe them.

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

So says the philosopher.

The two most potent post-war orthodoxies–socialist politics and modernist art–have at least one feature in common: they are both forms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.

Well, it’s either that or Trump.

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.

And philosophy…does it split the difference?