a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Erich Maria Remarque

But probably that’s the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we’re too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.[/b]

Okay, but how exaggerated?

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

I knew a few of them. And a few of them knew me.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Unless your life is a novel.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.

On the other hand, tell that to your brain.

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

Depending on, among other things, the credulity of your audience.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

He knew that he was.

[b]Daniel Day-Lewis

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.[/b]

Brutally honest enough for you?

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that’s never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

Sublimely honest enough for you?

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal… has always been the work of other actors.

Sure, that can work here too. No, seriously.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you’re suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

Want me to explain that? Or will you give it a try?

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.

Anyone here from Hollywood disagree?

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to give my time to.

Scatty: absentminded and disorganized.
Now you know.

[b]tiny nietzsche

it laughs when I hurt[/b]

Probably you, right?

too drunk to fibonacci sequence

Not drunk enough to care.

who can you alienate if you can’t alienate yourself?

Don’t get me started.

mercury is in despair

Yo, Fixed. Should we be worried?

my horoscope says don’t

Don’t what he dared to ask.

rock, paper, secret police

Coming to a city near you.

[b]John Cage

In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.[/b]

I’ll tell me my case, you tell me yours.

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he’ll arrive before death overtakes him.

Philosophers [sort of] too.

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.

Is that scary or what?

To see, one must go beyond the imagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

Let’s translate this into English.

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

You know, until that bumps into the real world.

A mind that is interested in changing…is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I’m certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won’t get anywhere.

So, tell me where you draw the line and I’ll tell I draw it.

[b]tiny nietzsche

all my hexes live in texas[/b]

Anything for a rhyme!

please leave the nihilist, reinforce his belief that life is meaningless

Or stay and reinforce it all the more.

your boyfriend wants to put a snowboard rack on your car and you don’t even like him that much

This ever happen to you?

it takes a village to burn it down

This ever happen to yours?

leaving the television on around the clock is not an answer for despair, it is the question

As longer as it’s one ot the other.

I’m often mistaken for a pile of rocks

Don’t you hate that?

[b]Terry Eagleton

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.[/b]

In other words, thank god for the either/or world.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Let’s just say, “close enough”, and move on.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

They don’t make insights like this anymore.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.

For example: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2428516&hilit=ghost+writer+directed#p2428516

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Cute, but, alas, increasingly more irrelevant.

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Next up: Good.

[b]Ottessa Moshfegh

The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy.[/b]

On the other hand, how comforting can a fantasy really be?

I could plan to do something and then find myself doing the opposite.

So, plan the opposite then.

Some families are so sick, so twisted, the only way out is for someone to die.

And, with any luck, it’s not you.

Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.

Oddly enough, people really do think things like this.

…in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.

All the way back to Miners Mills, for example.

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to.

Don’t kid yourself. It’s coming for you.

[b]tiny nietzsche

if you see me walking down the street and I start to cry, each time we’re at six feet, mask up boy, mask up boy[/b]

To this tune: youtu.be/ijhL9Y7skQs

my heights? wuthering

To this tune: youtu.be/-1pMMIe4hb4

I’m afraid of americans

If only because of the Kung-flu, Turd insisted.

the loneliness of a long distance nihilist

And loving it!

I never know what not to say

Or, here, what not to read.

find yourself a mountain to die on

Or, if you’re a Kid, a molehill.

[b]Karl Kraus

You don’t even live once.[/b]

Well, actually, I do. But point taken.

In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.

In other words, you first.

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

Next up: Peace.

Anesthesia: wounds without pain. Neurasthenia: pain without wounds.

This thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurasthenia

Not greeting people isn’t enough. One also doesn’t greet people one doesn’t know.

The more the merrier.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

And then one day it was the other way around.

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.[/b]

Wow, what if that were true here.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

This and that there being billions of us.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

He thought, hanging by a thread.

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it.

Nope, not yet.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it’s passage for some reason.

And then there’s what we do?

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn’t hit us the way it does.

Or, for that matter, life too.

[b]so sad today

listen, don’t make me regret being passive aggressive[/b]

I still don’t really know what that means.

well, i don’t like my face

It baffles me too: google.com/search?source=un … 66&bih=657

okay, we get it, you’re one of the “good” people

And you know who you aren’t!

i don’t like you anymore and it’s beautiful

She got that from me.

if you aren’t thinking about me you should be

I know: Am I thinking about you?

can’t believe this giant disgusting thing is just a feeling

Believe it.

[b]Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Anyone who expects sweetness from the grave is a fool…[/b]

Then you’re a fool, right?

The things you name do grow in power, but others that are not ever whispered claw at one’s heart anyway, rip it to shreds even if a syllable does not escape the lips.

das…

You shouldn’t do everything you want just because you can.

But only if you won’t get caught.

There is a point when a man may swim back to shore, but he was past it. There was nothing left but to be swallowed by the enormity of the sea.

One suspects there’s a land version of this too.

A sea roared inside her and made demands, but she waded it, she bobbed up, took a breath, and opened her eyes to the cold winter morning. Then she rose because the day was there, the world was there, and she wanted to be part of it.

Ambivalence, he thought. Ever and always.

if she didn’t sit down, calm herself, and close her eyes, she was going to smack the god of the dead across the face.

You know, if there is one.

[b]Caleb Carr

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.[/b]

Or, for some here, the greatest lie.

The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.

By way of, among others, Wilhelm Reich.

Imagine, Kriezler said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

Life’s funny that way, he thought.

You want to believe that there’s one relationship in life that’s beyond betrayal. A relationship that’s beyond that kind of hurt. And there isn’t.

Going back [so far] to Adam and Eve.

She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren’t the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.

Hell, any two-bit puddle could tell you that.

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves “New York Society”.

You explain it first.

[b]so sad today

trust the universe (to eventually kill you)[/b]

Yo, God!

i wonder if people hate me more or less than i think

Here? Let’s at least make it official, goddamnit!

i like to greet the new day by going back to bed

You know, if that’s actually an option.

fearing the unknown though the known is bad too

My guess: I get this more than you do.

in a complicated relationship with the amount of shit i have to do just to stay alive

My guess: Mine is more complicated than yours.

people are always like “you got this!” and i’m like “how do you know?”

Okay, how do you?
You know, given a particular context.

[b]Clarice Lispector

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.[/b]

Nope. For me it went the other way.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

Who, “me”?

Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.

For example, the sheer vastness of it.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that’s a bit much.

“I dare you to get this”, he groused.

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.

On the other hand…

Her curiosity instructed her more than the answers she was given.

In other words, uh-oh…

[b]Erich Maria Remarque

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.[/b]

I was thirty myself.

With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.

That’s certainly one explanation.

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

For example, getting out of bed each morning.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

Trust me: It wasn’t me.

Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them.

That’s how mine work.

Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.

If, for example, you’re a chickenhawk.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,’ merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.” Henrik Ibsen[/b]

So, what are we missing here, a context?

"Do not use that foreign word ‘ideals.’ We have that excellent native word ‘lies.’ "Henrik Ibsen

Yo, Trumpworlders!

“I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over." Henrik Ibsen

Yo, Kids!

“You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” Henrik Ibsen

The while point for some.

“A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Mark Twain

How idiotic is that?
Right?

“I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices.” Federico Fellini

Not counting good television of course.

[b]Daniel Day-Lewis

At some point in your life, if you’re lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.[/b]

Oh, yeah, sure you do.

I don’t like to rehearse. And I couldn’t understand how you could go through eight weeks of rehearsal, without exhausting every possibility. To the point where, you know, you would just lie gasping on the floor!

If not flailing.

It’s easy to love humanity when you’re this far away from it.

You know, whatever that means.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

Well, many minutes perhaps.

I can’t honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.

I think I understand this. At least better than you do.

It’s a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

Now that’s existential.

[b]John Cage

If you don’t have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it’s begun.[/b]

That certainly works here, doesn’t it?

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

You? Words, right? Defining them especially.

We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.

Of course that includes this too.

When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you’re doing it.

On the other hand [as we all know] when you create philosophy you are not acting as a musician.

What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.

Fuck the woods, he thought.

In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.

Let’s decide if this is actually important to know.

[b]tiny nietzsche

will to power less[/b]

And then one day will to power nothing at all.

back on my dionysian shit

Or: back to your apollonian shit.

zooms in on the bookcase in your selfie

Like that’s ever been done.

what idiot called it The Shape of Water instead of Phantom of the Agua?

So, is that idiotic?

I’m a failed state

Jesus, he thought, what’s that make Trumpworld then?

hey now, you’re infected, take your mask off, go die

Soon to become the new normal.