Unlabelled Passage Of The Day

My best friend just died, and even though I can't think or feel straight, that quote oddly gives me a weird sense of understanding. Thanks.
 
Even though I am conflicted about Christopher Hitchens, he started a review of The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet (oh, how the mighty have fallen) with this amazing opening salvo:

"This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason."

Anyone can read the full review here: Log In - The New York Times.
 
“The mind wants to breathe, and breathe deeply. It is tired of racing, of guessing. Of swiping an endless scroll. It is sick from artificial light, from trying to keep up. It longs to see things as they are, to focus on particulars, to connect—to people, to art, to ideas—for longer than modern life allows.”

-Benoit Pioulard
 
"Everything you do on this planet has a meaning if it is in accordance with what you were before being human, and what you become after."

- Karlheinz Stockhausen
 
"In reality, Uncle Helmuth embodies the spirit of "uncritical social criticism", as John calls it - and in this respect, he is a potential Nazi. Criticism, says John, was the intrinsic forte of the Nazi movement. . . Like the criticism voiced by the German National Socialists of that time, Uncle Helmuth's is too general, too universal, and thus ultimately not maneuverable, an overcanvased ship. His criticism comes not from sober analysis but from resentment, from a general sulkiness about life, an ill humor that only imagines most of the insults and injuries that nourish him, and thus has no solid goal, no concrete object. Uncle Helmuth reacts instinctively against any stimulus that he views as characteristic of something opposing him. It may be a lady in sable or a whistling tramp, a speeding car, a silly advertising slogan on a poster, a kiss on some woman's hand, a certain way of donning a hat - particularly anything testifying to a way of life that strikes him as freer, lighter, cheerier than his own, thereby putting his in doubt.
And because he feels like a victim, he stuffs everything possible into this hate: blame for the whole dreary monotony of his existence, the probable disappointment in his thwarted professional ambitions. . .his concern about the state of the world, which his newspaper makes him worry about every morning, reminding him how helpless he is, how at the mercy of the powers. . .
He has a collective name for everything he hates. The species that he imagines as enjoying a more carefree way of life than his own (and this comprises proletarians as well as plutocrats, also 'society people' and 'snobs'. . .) is summarily known as "they".
"They are the people responsible for (or rather guilty of) the fate of mankind - the powerful (oppressors), the rich (exploiters), the undisciplined uneducated (anarchists) - and are pilloried in sentences beginning "They've got us in another mess. . ." or "They're grabbing the lion's share, of course. . ." or "They can't bear seeing something in order. . ." The obvious flippancy, unscrupulousness, inconsiderateness of these plainly well known but unnameable anonymouses inspire such rhetoric as "They're amused. . .they skim off the cream and relish it. . .they laugh up their sleeves, of course. . .they just let you kick the bucket. . ."
And this they is elastic enough to cover whole strata; nay, whole nations: the British, for instance ("They imagine they're superior"). It extends to writers of popular songs ("They give people highfalutin' ideas") and to Jews ("They've known how to cheat our kind for two thousand years now"). In addition, there is room for the traditional whipping-boys of middle-class resentment: they (aristocrats), they (Reds), they (priests), they (Freemasons), they (journalists). . ."

- Gregor von Rezzori, The Death of My Brother Abel
 
“If I were a butterfly and you were seated in your garden reading this page on a summers afternoon I would flutter past you and cast a tiny shadow across these words” – Thomas Wiloch
 
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You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.

-- Charlotte Bronte, Vilette
 
He is beside us in every deepest action and speaks through us in every fateful announcement. There is no escaping him or his influence. His voice whispers suddenly in the night, his presence intangibly lingers at our shoulder when we feel ourselves most alone. He is the Man on the Back, the Secret Sharer. He is the Worm that Dieth Seldom, the Great Sickness.

Yet in it all there is, I suspect, a terrible paradox. We do not hate him. We fear him, perhaps: but secretly, in our hearts, we still love him. He may be the Worm: if he is, he is Brother Worm.

We go: and he – the Other Passenger – is always at our side. Always, always, always – to the grave: and perhaps beyond it ...

- John Keir Cross: "The Other Passenger"
 
"So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."
— George Orwell (1984)
 
"Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever -
"Don't let them see us. Don't tell them what we are doing -"
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth?
"For God's sake don't let that Coca-Cola thing out - "
"Not The Cancer Deal with The Venusians - "
"Not The Green Deal - Don't show them that - "
"Not The Orgasm Death - "
"Not the ovens - "
Listen: I call you all. Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it all back. Play it all pay it all play it all back. For all to see. In Times Square. In Picadilly.
"Premature. Premature. Give us a little more time."
Time for what? More lies? Premature? Premature for who? I say to all these words are not premature. These words may be too late. Minutes to go. Minutes to foe goal -
"Top Secret - Classified - For The Board - The Elite - The Initiates -
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth? These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies. Cowards who can not face your "dogs" your "gooks" your "errand boys" your "human animals" with the truth. Collaborators with Insect People with Vegetable People. With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever. To sh*t forever. For this you have sold out your sons. Sold the ground from unborn feet forever. Traitors to all souls everywhere. You want the name of Hassan i Sabbah on your filth deeds to sell out the unborn?
What scared you all into time? Into body? Into sh*t? I will tell you; "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien Enemy imprisons "thee" in Time, In Body. In Sh*t. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open."
- William S. Burroughs, Nova Express
 
The Half-Finished Heaven by Tomas Tranströmer:

"Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth."
 
What he wanted to say was: "All the officers have two or three children by now and they read letters from home over and over again, and look at pictures their kids have drawn of houses and the sun and flowers. Those men have thrown opportunity away--there's no hope for them anymore. I've never done much, but I've lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I'm right, then a limpid , lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn someday, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call me from the distance--and I'll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That's why I've never married. I've waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty."

-Yukio Mishima (translated by John Nathan)
 
“The Christian narrative states that a maximally powerful, maximally good, all-knowing aseitic being consciously created everything, including man who short-circuited shortly after. This failure resulted in the immediate separation of all earthly things, including man, from the Creator: the Middle Eastern deity named Yhwh. The objective of life, according to the Christian narrative, is to return to communion with Yhwh. Failure to do so in a finite space of time (a single lifetime of indeterminate duration and unequal resources) will result in Yhwh tossing the individual into an abyss he created for his finest and most beautiful creation, an angel named Lucifer (Ezekiel 28:12,13), who also short-circuited sometime earlier. This is considered by Christians to be the ultimate punishment: an eternal separation from the god, Yhwh.

This narrative is wholesale nonsense.

As a theology (and scaffolding for a tremendously flawed accompanying theodicy), it is an extravagant work of self-annihilating absurdity. As a maximally good, aseitic being, everything was once part of perfection. That’s what aseity means. There was no-thing that was not already perfect. To argue otherwise is to concede Yhwh was not, in fact, perfect. Creation, therefore, destroyed this eternal harmony, this purity, and by this fact alone, the act of Creation can only be called maximally evil. Creation separated things from the perfect goodness. Creation expelled goodness and cast it into a state of imperfection, and that is evil. In the second instance, as Lucifer—Yhwh’s most perfect creation—had already failed, which was itself inevitable, then that means Yhwh consciously flung man into an already corrupted Creation, and that, too, is evil.”

- John Zande
 
"He had found (...) that there were certain things to be said in favour of drinking in the mornings. He had discovered, quite by accident, that it could be a fine thing, on a gray dismal morning – a morning of limp, oyster-coloured weather – to be gently but firmly drunk, making a pleasure of melancholy. But it had to be undertaken with a chemist's precision; bad things could happen in the event of a mistake. There were nameless cliffs that could be fallen over, and on grey days there were always selfpity and grief nibbling about, like earnest mice, at the corner of morning drunkenness. But he was a wise man, and he knew about these matters. Like morphine it all depended upon proper measurements."

- Walter Tevis: The Man Who Fell To Earth
 
"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

Conclusion of Orwell's essay on Dickens.
 
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