a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Terry Eagleton

If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.[/b]

And then there’s whatever the hell is happening today. Don’t even pretend to understand it.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

We know for sure now. One way or the other.

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

Obviously: It didn’t work.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.

Yo, Mr. Objectivist, let’s settle this.

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

Next up: the conservative state. Though not necessarily yours.

I enjoy popularisation and I think I’m reasonably good at it. I also think it’s a duty. It’s just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.

What others call “dumbing down”.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

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

Imagine then his reaction to television today!

“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!

“The chief benefit of philosophy arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret, insensible influence, than from application.” David Hume

Among other things, complete bullshit.
No?
You start the new thread.

“Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.” Thomas Mann

We’ll need a context of course. Historically and culturally for example.

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” Baruch Spinoza

"No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” Baruch Spinoza

For example: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=190558

[b]Ottessa Moshfegh

And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.[/b]

You read things like this in books. And then decide for yourself if it goes too far.

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet.

Maybe, but don’t let that fool you.

I didn’t believe in heaven, but I did believe in hell.

After all, he thought, we’re living in it.

Sometimes I feel dead, I told her, and I hate everybody.

Well, believe it or not, sometimes I don’t.

Every three days, I’d wake up, look at calendar, eat, drink, bathe, et cetera. I would only spend one hour awake each time. I did the math: for the next four months, 120 days total. I would spend only fourth hours in a conscious state.

Wow, if only!

But coming out of that sleep was excruciating. My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was. I’d try to remember something else—a better version, a happy story, maybe, or just an equally lame but different life that would at least be refreshing in its digressions—but it never worked. I was always still me. Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears. The only times I cried, in fact, were when I was pulled out of that nothingness, when the alarm on my cell phone went off.

In other words, not just a shitty mood anymore.

[b]Otto Weininger

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.[/b]

Yo, Victor! Yo, Olivia!

It is not the fear of death which creates the desire for immortality, but the desire for immortality which causes the fear of death.

That works for me.

Every true, eternal problem is an equally true, eternal fault; every answer an atonement, every realisation an improvement.

Next up: Of course, a fucking context!

Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.

True, but not more alone than I am.

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworthiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

Let’s run this by karpel tunnel.

In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension.

Next up: Fractured and fragmented personalities.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I was making my mind as blank as possible, you see, since the past was so embarrassing and the future so terrifying.” Kurt Vonnegut[/b]

Lots of blank minds here of course. You know, going in the opposite direction.

“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.” Kurt Vonnegut

Next up: Somebody gets into trouble. And it keeps getting worse and worse.

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

What we call civilization.

“Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.” Thomas Mann

Like that matters.

“The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.” C.S. Lewis

Maybe, but who gave it to Him?

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” Søren Kierkegaard

Come on, Kids, defend yourself!

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it–that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.[/b]

We nihilists too.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like?

Run it by God?

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within.

Not only that, but non negotiable.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

Or: Fuck them.

Who are you, anyway?
Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

Just letting you know that I need saving myself.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

No, really.

[b]Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Like many young people, ultimately she saw herself as a completely new creature, a creation that had sprung from no ancient soils.[/b]

Well, youth is wasted on the young. That never changes.

The world might indeed be a cursed circle; the snake swallowed its tail and there could be no end, only an eternal ruination and endless devouring.

You know, if you’re an optimist.

One could construct a hundred different narratives, it didn’t make them true.

On the other hand, believe them and [for some] nothing makes them false.

It turned out to be a crock of shit. They had printed manuals with gender-appropriate terminology and the like, but detectives still called gay men “faggots,” women were “bitches,” and if a “lady” was raped the first question to ask was what she’d done to incite the crime.

We’ve got a few detectives like that here, don’t we?

Beauty attracts beauty and begets beauty.

Though still in the eye [and the mind] of the beholder. Or has that changed too?

The imagination of mortals shaped the gods, carving their faces and their myriad forms, just as the water molds the stones in its path, wearing them down through the centuries.

And killing off some of them.

[b]Caleb Carr

Scientists’ minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.[/b]

Next up: philosophers’ minds.

It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences.

Okay, Mr. Buddhist, explain that.

We are not obligated to provide everyone who comes to this country with a good life, Morgan went on. We are obligated to provide them with a chance to attain that life, through discipline and hard work. That chance is more than they have anywhere else. That is why they keep coming.

Besides, there will always be a need [for some] for a source of cheap and exploitable labor.

… belief that the answers one gives to life’s crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.

Dasein!!

Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.

A little help with this one please. I’d have figured Wall Street.

How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?

Or, from to time, to a young woman whose uncle.