Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Karl Ove Knausgård

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.

All of them so far.

All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.

Let's name names.

I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.

Let's name names.

I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me.

In fact, don't even think about it.

I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

God. Another pipe that sprung a leak?

What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

Not that [for most] the answers will be any different.

[iambiguous]

Barbara Kingsolver from The Poisonwood Bible

This Forest eats itself and lives forever.

At least until we came along.

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

Not to mention the other way around.

But Anatole said suddenly, Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go bad, you will blame yourself.
What are you telling me?
I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.

And this explains...what exactly?

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

Imagine him tromping here.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

Not counting the ones that end up on Dateline.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

Anyone here like to take a crack at it?

[iambiguous]

Kathryn Stockett from The Help

Today I'm on tell you bout a man from outer space. She just loves hearing about peoples from outer space. Her favorite show on the tee-vee is My Favorite Martian, I pull on my antennae hats I shaped last night out a tin foil, fasten em on our heads. One for her and one for me. We look like we a couple a crazy people in them things.
One day, a wise Martian come down to Earth to teach us people a thing or two, I say.
Martian? How big?
Oh, he about six-two.
What's his name?
Martian Luther King.
She take a deep breath and lean her head down on my shoulder. I feel her three-year-old heart racing against mine, flapping like butterflies on my white uniform.
He was a real nice Martian, Mister King. Looked just like us, nose, mouth, hair up on his head, but sometime people looked at him funny and sometime, well, I guess sometime people was just downright mean.
I coul get in a lot a trouble telling her these little stories, especially with Mister Leefolt. But Mae Mobley know these our 'secret stories'.
Why Aibee? Why was they so mean to him? she ask.
Cause he was green.

Green. That'll do it.

Womens, they ain't like men. A woman ain't gone beat you with a stick. Miss Hilly wouldn't pull no pistol on me. Miss Leefolt wouldn't come burn my house down. No, white womens like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set of tools they use, sharp as witches' fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with em.

Pick two:
1] Men!
2] Women!

Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.

Yeah, how come?

I give in and light another cigarette even though last night the surgeon general came on the television set and shook his finger at everybody, trying to convince us that smoking will kill us. But Mother once told me tongue kissing would turn me blind and I'm starting to think it's all just a big plot between the surgeon general and Mother to make sure no one ever has any fun.

Actually the surgeon general is on to something.

I head down the steps to see if my mail-order copy of Catcher in the Rye is in the box. I always order the banned books from a black-market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.

Any banned books that are actually bad?

She dumb. I sigh. But she ain’t stupid.

For example?

[iambiguous]

Nihilism...

“There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.'” Friedrich Nietzsche

Or, if you are particularly lucky, you go insane.

“Crazed with helplessness, I cursed God and wept, wondering if He wept also.” Alan Moore

Rain we call it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods

“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Well, so far, anyway.

“Alle Wege führen zur Erkenntnis der Nichtigkeit aller Dinge, aber keiner führt zurück.” Juli Zeh

Well, so far, anyway.

“The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.
With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.” Flaubert Gustave

Least of all in the postmodern world.
Or most of all?

“What, more realistically, is this 'mutation, the 'new man'? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the 'free-thinker' and skeptic, closed only to the truth but 'open' to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the 'seeker' after some 'new revelation,' ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping 'fact' because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is 'possible'; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his 'rights,' yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest 'stimulus; the 'rebel,' hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the 'mass man,' this new barbarian, thoroughly 'reduced' and 'simplified' and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.” Seraphim Rose

Me more or less than you?

[iambiguous]

Stupidity...

“Once you believe a lie to be the truth, you are now in the rather unfavorable position of having to change every truth that you encounter in order to support the lie that you now believe. And given the wildly proliferating progression that now ensues due to the fact that you must do this for every lie that you create, it becomes exceedingly apparent why the truth might be painful, but why it’s a whole lot easier.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

Not counting Donald Trump of course. Or only counting him?

“It’s like I've been walking through a minefield blindfolded, and the explosions are starting to catch up with me. The shrapnel of my own stupidity and selfishness raining down on my head.” Daniel Ruczko

Alas, that just never seems to be the case here. If anything, the opposite.

“Foolishness is to destroy your life attempting to achieve something that will destroy your life. Insanity is to deny that what you’re doing will result in either.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

Be honest: does the shoe fit?

“Ana Ferreira Evans remembered a remark Mrs. Alsop had once made. Some people are willfully ignorant. They aren't stupid--they simply choose to be oblivious. That way they aren't responsible for anything that goes wrong.” Nancy Horan

Be honest: which shoe fits?

“It was a combination of genetics, stupidity, and bad luck, like everything else that goes wrong in life.” Cade Metz

That and posting it all here.

“Money, success, integration into a solid, recognised world - all these factors contribute to an economy of the self. There is no longer any need to think about your needs, your mood, your behaviour, your friends, or your life, no need to understand or to look any further: the world you're in provides all that right away.” Martin Page

No, really, for millions this is actually the case.

[iambiguous]

Stieg Larsson

Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.

We've got one of them here, don't we?

Always retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt unmanageable. That was a basic rule of survival.

Cue Neil McCauley: "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."
That's the discipline.

No, I don't believe in God, but I respect the fact that you do. Everyone has to have something to believe in.

Cue W.C. Fields: "I believe I'll have another beer".

To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it's an absolute duty.

If that's an option, of course.

Dear Government...
I'm going to have a serious talk with you if I ever find anyone to talk to.

"Press one followed by the pound sign."

There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer.

Especially when you play with fire.

[iambiguous]

John Lennon

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

Ask me about that.

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

Bottom line [ever and always]: we choose behaviors based on what we believe. And it is our behaviors that precipitate consequences. Just ask Mark David Chapman.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

On the other hand, happy about what?

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

Any great women here? In other words, given all the idiots.

The more I see, the less I know for sure.

Thus: https://youtu.be/aCNkPpq1giU?si=QQCDGCQ7W_o0v8_D

One thing you can't hide is when you're crippled inside.

That and when you're fractured and fragmented.

[promethean75]

This is actually mathematically workable and logically possible if society is radically redesigned. But only if. Behold some truly remarkable insight and revolutionary thought where it really matters man. Like when prof Wolff said people spend half of their waking day at work. That's where life is, what it's about, so that's the thing u wanna get straightened out before u start debating about Aquinas and the concept of quiddity. Save that shit for later. This is what the people want; to work less and have more. They really don't care much about quantum fluctuation or Hobbes's leviathan.

"As production becomes more efficient, and the working week has been dramatically shortened, workers can be transferred to other sectors so that the whole economy benefits from reductions in the working week elsewhere. This will mean that 'less pleasant' jobs, for example, will also see a significant reduction in the working week as more workers are co-opted to work there. That will be done under local democratic control, by agreement, not coercion. In turn this will mean that if, say, worker, NN, is employed in waste disposal — and there will be very much less of that in a socialist society, too —, they will find that occupation much less onerous and unpleasant when they have to spend only half a day a week, or less, doing it, without loss of pay. That will be especially so if a rota system is introduced, meaning that NN might work in the above sector only once a month for half-a-day.

So, under socialism, full employment will in the end mean a couple of hours a week, or less, for everybody (except in very specialised areas, like the medical profession or engineering, much of which will be largely automated, under computer control, anyway). This will progressively introduce a truly self-developmental and leisure-based society for the first time in human history — for all of humanity, not the top 1%."

Taken from: https://www.quora.com/Is-work-in-commun ... chtenstein

[iambiguous]

Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.

Then this part: https://youtu.be/leTGg3W1YHU?si=nQzphC7wyih_wTpe

Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

Tell that to, oh, I don't know, the objectivists?

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

Comes here, in other words.

You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.

More or less autonomously?

The real man wants two different things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

"Men!", as some here would scoff.

He who obeys, does not listen to himself!

In other words, whatever that means.

[iambiguous]

Viet Thanh Nguyen from The Sympathizer

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development.

A rapid evolutionary development of course. It starts with a C.

...no one asks poor people if they want war.

No one asked me if I wanted be in one.

Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans, those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven.

Okay, but what if they are?

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.

Hint, hint.

Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?

Commie!!!

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.

Instead, he's here defining and defending Idealism up in the philosophical clouds.

[iambiguous]

Suicide...

“Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people's reaction to my trying to commit suicide.” Emilie Autumn

I can recall other things myself.

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” Albert Camus

Waiting for godot?

“When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.” Jeannette Walls

Okay, but still...

“When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.” Marilyn Monroe

At least until Saturday.

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.” Sylvia Plath

Just for the record...

"If you are a healthy adult and land in just the right way you can survive a fall of up to five stories or 49 feet/15 meters. Though some people have miraculously survived falls of over 10,000 feet/3,048. Plus the highest fall ever survived was an astounding 33,333 feet/ 10,160 meters." quora

“There used to be days that I thought I was okay, or at least that I was going to be. We'd be hanging out somewhere and everything would just fit right and I would think 'it will be okay if it can just be like this forever' but of course nothing can ever stay just how it is forever.” Nina LaCour

I'll have to admit that nothing in my life ever has.

[iambiguous]

Karl Ove Knausgård

Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?

Though even then only until the workers of the world unite.

Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.

Besides, it is a pitch: https://youtu.be/HpDDTS08wPs?si=uVX9n0IFtW4rCUyB

I have no problem with uninteresting or unoriginal people – they may have other, more important attributes, such as warmth, consideration, friendliness, a sense of humor or talents such as being able to make a conversation flow to generate an atmosphere of ease around them, or the ability to make a family function – but I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.

Here?
Pick one:
1] the pinheads
2] the serious philosophers

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

You tell me.
On second thought, forget about it.

How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?

Unless of course that works.

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.

Coming here, certaintly.

[iambiguous]

Edith Wharton from The Age of Innocence

Each time you happen to me all over again.

You tell me. No, really.

Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.


No, seriously.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

Anyone behaving like that here?
Which novel?

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

Ah, the age of innocence.

His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

Not many that won't be.

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.

Pick one:
1] class
2] caste

[iambiguous]

Nihilism

Those who have been pulled out of the calm tranquility of the void and trapped for life to a bodily existence have a single consolation: everything that lives, also dies. Sooner or later, the tragedy will be forever over. Every life is destined to return to the sweet nothing from which it emerged without its consent. This is our consolation.” Selim Güre

Indeed! Who needs immortality and salvation!!

“In account after account of exorcisms the demonic voices will propound nihilism of one variety or another.” J.R.R. Tolkien

Let's just hope they don't show up here.

“Ai pus nitroglicerină sub perna lui dumnezeu ...” Saşa Pană

And look where we are now.

“Humans are born to die, anything in between is just pure nonsense.” Anupam S Shlok

Go figure?

“The products and processes of nature which functionally disseminate life are each founded by a pledge of pain to be endured. Every good, every sigh is a distraction allaying weakness and death. Nature is a malformed vermin, a parasite burrowing audaciously the aches of a comatose universe.” Jacob H. Kyle

So, not unlike God then.

“In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend's suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!” Ivan Turgenev

Anyone here recall what that suggestion was?

[iambiguous]

Kathryn Stockett from The Help

Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious.

And the equivalent of that here.
Though, just out of curiosity, what is the equivalent of that here?

That's all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.

And the equivalent of that here, of course.

Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.

Let's all pitch in and repair ours.

I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.

How about when you run out of days?

Mrs. Charlotte Phelan's Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.

Cruelly enough, that hasn't changed much.
If it was supposed to.

I looked after that Dudley family for too long, over six years. His daddy would take him to the garage and whip him with a rubber hose-pipe trying to beat the girl out a that boy until I couldn't stand it no more...I wish to God I'd told John Green Dudley he ain't going to hell. That he ain't no sideshow freak cause he like boys. I wish to God I'd filled his ears with good things like I'm trying to do with Mae Mobley. Instead, I just sat in the kitchen, waiting to put the salve on them hose-pipe welts.

Outrage and options. If you get her drift.