On Slavery

The people who escaped a great darkness will curse a candle because it is not a sun.

What Does Europe Owe the Jews?

#250 "What does Europe owe the Jews? All sorts of things, good and bad, and above all one that is at the same time among the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the terror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and grandeur of being worthy of raising moral questions and as a result precisely the most attractive, most awkward, and most exquisite parts of those plays of colours and enticements to life, whose afterglow these days makes the sky of our European culture glow in its evening light perhaps as it burns itself out. Among the spectators and philosophers, we artists are grateful to the Jews for that."

Platonism for the People

"Christianity is Platonism for the people."

Old King Log

The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log.

The frog-pool wanted a king.
Let Jove now send them Young King Stork.
Caligula's chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief.

My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent.
I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread.
I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again.

Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar.
Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful.
King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings.

By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error.
By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error.
Violent disorders call for violent remedies.

Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log.
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

The Kind of God

A man will find the kind of God he needs the most.

The Light of the Furthest Stars

#285 "The greatest events and thoughts--the greatest thoughts, however, are the greatest events--are longest in being comprehended: the generations which are contemporary with them do not experience such events--they live past them. Something happens there as in the realm of stars. The light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man denies--that there are stars there. "How many centuries does a mind require to be understood?"--that is also a standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an etiquette therewith, such as is necessary for mind and for star."

What You Have to Know

#277 (paraphrased) You have to actually build a house in order to learn everything you have to know before you start.

The Abyss

#146 "He who fights with monsters should take care that he himself does not become a monster. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you."

The Harmful and Dangerous Truth

#39 "Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the "truth" one could still barely endure or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified. But there is no doubt at all that the evil and unhappy are more favored when it comes to the discovery of certain parts of truth, and that the probability of their success here is greater - not to speak of the evil who are happy, a species the moralists bury in silence."

On Reading

I envy those who can read a book through once and get it. I have to read a book at least twice, and sometimes more than that, to feel like I have entered into the mind of and understand the intentions of the author.

The Long Secret Work

#32 "During the longest part of human history - so-called prehistorical times - the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences. The action itself was considered as little as its origin. It was rather the way a distinction or disgrace still reaches back today from a child to its parents, in China: it was the retroactive force of success or failure that led men to think well or ill of an action. Let us call this period the pre-moral period of mankind: the imperative "know thyself!" was as yet unknown. In the last ten thousand years, however, one has reached the point, step by step, in a few large regions on the earth, where it is no longer the consequences but the origin of an action that one allows to decide its value. On the whole this is a great event which involves a considerable refinement of vision and standards; it is the unconscious aftereffect of the rule of aristocratic values and the faith in "descent" - the sign of a period that one may call moral in the narrower sense. It involves the first attempt at self-knowledge. Instead of the consequences, the origin: indeed a reversal of perspective! Surely, a reversal achieved only after long struggles and vacillations. To be sure, a calamitous new superstition, an odd narrowness of interpretation, thus become dominant: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense as origin in an intention; one came to agree that the value of an action lay in the value of the intention. The intention as the whole origin and prehistory of an action - almost to the present day this prejudice dominated moral praise, blame, judgment, and philosophy on earth. But today - shouldn't we have reached the necessity of once more resolving on a reversal and fundamental shift in values, owing to another self-examination of man, another growth in profundity? Don't we stand at the threshold of a period which should be designated negatively, to begin with, as extra-moral? After all, today at least we immoralists have the suspicion that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional in it, while everything about it that is intentional, everything about it that can be seen, known, "conscious," still belongs to its surface and skin - which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even more. In short, we believe that the intention is merely a sign and symptom that still requires interpretation - moreover, a sign that means too much and therefore, taken by itself alone, almost nothing. We believe that morality in the traditional sense, the morality of intentions, was a prejudice, precipitate and perhaps provisional - something on the order of astrology and alchemy - but in any case something that must be overcome. The overcoming of morality, in a certain sense even the self-overcoming of morality - let this be the name for that long secret work which has been saved up for the finest and most honest, also the most malicious, consciences of today, as living touchstones of the soul."

Beauty

Beauty is everywhere a clue to a violent past.

Foul Smell

#30. "There are books that have opposite values for soul and health, depending on whether the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more vigorous ones turn to them: in the former case, these books are dangerous and lead to crumbling and disintegration; in the latter, heralds' cries that call the bravest to their courage. Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them. Where the people eat and drink, even where they venerate, it usually stinks. One should not go to church if one wants to breathe pure air."

Such Beings As We Are

#3. "Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life. For example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less than 'truth' -- such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless mere foreground estimates, a certain kind of niaiserie which may be necessary for the preservation of just such beings as we are. Supposing, that is, that not just man is the 'measure of things.'"

Gratitude and Cleanliness

#74 "A man with genius is unbearable if he does not also have at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness."

Meaning Without Words

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'

The Last Words of Socrates

"Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?"

The Labor Theory of Value

Parking on Main Street: $1.
Admission to the Columbia Museum of Art: $10.
Seeing the Nativity by Sandro Botticelli: Priceless.

Botticelli died in 1510.
He stopped painting that same year.

Religion and Entertainment

What if Emerson got it backward? What if the entertainment of one age really becomes the religion of the next?

The Deuteronomists

"Finally, the Deuteronomists stripped the king of his traditional powers. He was no longer a sacred figure. In an astonishing departure from Near Eastern custom, the Deuteronomists drastically limited the sovereign's prerogatives. His only duty was to read the written torah, 'diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes, neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandments, either to the right or the left, so that he and his descendants may reign long over his kingdom in Israel.' The king was no longer the son of God, the special servant of Yahweh, or a member of the divine council. He had no special privileges but, like his people, was subject to the law. How could the Deuteronomists justify these changes, which overturned centuries of sacred tradition? We do not know exactly who the Deuteronomists were. The story of the discovery of the scroll suggests that they included priests, prophets, and scribes. Their movement could have originated in the northern kingdom and come south to Judah after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722. They may also reflect the views of the disenfrancised am ha-aretz, who had put Josiah on the throne."

Sleep of Reason

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos

The sleep of reason produces monsters.

You Shout

"...to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures..."

The Truth Does Not Change

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive."

A Beautiful and Humane Occupation

"To the captain he is faithful like a friend and attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane occupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce."

La Tendre Indifférence du Monde

Comme si cette grande colère m'avait purgé du mal, vidé d'éspoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe."

La Porte du Malheur

J’ai secoué la sueur et le soleil. J’ai compris que j’avais détruit l’équilibre du jour, le silence exceptionnel d’une plage où j’avais été heureux. Alors, j’ai tiré encore quatre fois sur un corps inerte où les balles s’enfonçaient sans qu’il y parût. Et c’était comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur.

"I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."

The Inferno, Canto XXXIV

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.


(Italian audio file)

The Inferno, Canto XI

D'ogne malizia, ch'odio in cielo acquista,
ingiuria è 'l fine, ed ogne fin cotale
o con forza o con frode altrui contrista.

Every evil deed despised in Heaven
has as its end injustice. Each such end
harms someone else through either force or fraud.

The Inferno, Canto I

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
For I had lost the right path.

(Italian audio file)

The One True Problem of Philosophy

Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c'est le suicide. Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d'être vécue, c'est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie. Le reste, si le monde a trois dimensions, si l'esprit a neuf ou douze catégories, vient ensuite. Ce sont des jeux ; il faut d'abord répondre.

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer."

Queerer Than We Can Suppose

"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of or can be dreamed of in any philosophy."

J. B. S. Haldane, 1892 - 1964

Simple Child of Nature

"Near by is an interesting ruin -- the meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple -- a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice -- in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell!"

Fraudulent History

"But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory. Now I grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail--to wit: that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named Waite and Granger, went in disguise to the house of John Moody, in Rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and I also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December following. Very well." [Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own invincible weapon--clean, pure, manufactured history, without a word of truth in it.] "Very well, I say. But Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina? You are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance. Your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be intimately conversant with every detail of this national quarrel. You develop matters of history every day that show plainly that you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a man who has searched the depths and possessed yourself of everything that has a bearing upon the great question. Therefore, let me just recall to your mind that Willis and Morgan case--though I see by your face that the whole thing is already passing through your memory at this moment. On the 12th of August, 1860, two months before the Waite and Granger affair, two South Carolina clergymen, named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L. Willis, one a Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist, disguised themselves, and went at midnight to the house of a planter named Thompson--Archibald F. Thompson, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson,--and took thence, at midnight, his widowed aunt, (a Northern woman,) and her adopted child, an orphan--named Mortimer Highie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on crutches in consequence; and the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and afterward burned them at the stake in the city of Charleston. You remember perfectly well what a stir it made; you remember perfectly well that even the Charleston Courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant, of questionable propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued. And you remember also, that this thing was the cause of the Massachusetts outrage. Who, indeed, were the two Massachusetts ministers? and who were the two Southern women they burned? I do not need to remind you, Admiral, with your intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was the nephew of the
woman burned in Charleston; that Granger was her cousin in the second degree, and that the woman they burned in Boston was the wife of John H. Morgan, and the still loved but divorced wife of Winthrop L. Willis. Now, Admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge that the first provocation came from the Southern preachers and that the Northern ones were justified in retaliating. In your arguments you never yet have shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore I have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the South Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs."

The Admiral was conquered. This sweet spoken creature who swallowed his fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life; basked in his furious blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine; found only calm, even-handed justice in his rampart partisanship; and flooded him with invented history so sugarcoated with flattery and deference that there was no rejecting it, was "too many" for him. He stammered some awkward, profane sentences about the-----Willis and Morgan business having escaped his memory, but that he "remembered it now," and then, under pretence of giving Fan some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle and went away, a vanquished man. Then cheers and laughter went up, and Williams, the ship's benefactor was a hero. The news went about the vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception instituted in the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the conqueror. The wheelman said afterward, that the Admiral stood up behind the pilot house and "ripped and cursed all to himself" till he loosened the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail.

Buck Fanshaw

There was a grand time over Buck Fanshaw when he died. He was a representative citizen. He had "killed his man"--not in his own quarrel, it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset by numbers. He had kept a sumptuous saloon. He had been the proprietor of a dashing helpmeet whom he could have discarded without the formality of a divorce. He had held a high position in the fire department and been a very Warwick in politics. When he died there was great lamentation throughout the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum of society.

On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck--and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by the visitation of God." What could the world do without juries?

A True Face of God

"It could be that the Jesus Christians know is both an illusion and a true face of God.

And maybe, for that matter, worshiping a divinely sponsored illusion is about as close as people can get to seeing the face of God. Human beings are organic machines that are built by natural selection to deal with other organic machines. They can visualize other organic beings, understand other organic beings, and bestow love and gratitude on other organic beings. Understanding the divine, visualizing the divine, loving the divine--that would be a tall order for a mere human being."

Secret of Success

"And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses incurred? Everybody's head was full of such "calculations" as those-- such raving insanity, rather. Few people took work into their calculations--or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures of other people.

We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again. Why? Because we judged that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining--which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining!"

Die Lösung /The Solution

Die Lösung

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer's Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Dangerous Weapons

"I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill,and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only had one fault--you could not hit anything with it. One of our "conductors" practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief. The Secretary had a small-sized Colt's revolver strapped around him for protection against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped. Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our fellow-traveler.

We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old original "Allen" revolver, such as irreverent people called a "pepper-box." Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an "Allen" in the world. But George's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, "If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch something else." And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon--the "Allen." Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it."

Never Stop Talking

"Unlike the Jews, the Greeks could never stop talking, and as is always the case with such people, their favorite subject was themselves."

The Gods Themselves

"The results of human motivations and heavenly interventions make for preordained results, but preordained only in a way so complicated and with so many conflicting strands that no one but a seer or prophet could sort it all out beforehand and identify in the present the seeds of future results. This means that human beings -- and even to some extent the gods themselves -- are caught, like figures in a tapestry who cannot undo their thread, playing out their assigned roles of hero or king, loving mother or sexual prize, divine patron of this or that person or city, with only flickering insight into what result their character and needs will have upon the whole of the human enterprise."

Raise the Dead

"For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life."

History Must be Learned in Pieces

"History must be learned in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past -- shards, ostraca, palimpsets, crumbling codices with missing pages, newsreel clips, snatches of song, faces of iols whose bodies have long since turned to dust -- which give us glimpses of what has been but never the whole reality. How could they? We cannot encompass the whole reality even of the times in which we live. Human beings never know more than part, as 'through a glass darkly'; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces."

The Return of Spring

"Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess of springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world. And when she returns from the dark realms she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave."

For Such a Son

For such a son who would not sacrifice such a daughter!

Schilleresque Noble Hearts

That's how it always is with these Schilleresque noble hearts; till the last moment every goose is a swan with them, till the last moment, they hope for the best and will see nothing wrong, and although they have an inkling of the other side of the picture, yet they won't face the truth till they are forced to; the very thought of it makes them shiver; they thrust the truth away with both hands, until the man they deck out in false colours puts a fool's cap on them with his own hands.

A Fortune All at Once

"But why, if you are so clever, do you lie here like a sack and have nothing to show for it? One time you used to go out, you say, to teach children. But why is it you do nothing now?"

"I am doing . . ." Raskolnikov began sullenly and reluctantly.

"What are you doing?"

"Work . . ."

"What sort of work?"

"I am thinking," he answered seriously after a pause.

Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill.

"And have you made much money by your thinking?" she managed to articulate at last.

"One can't go out to give lessons without boots. And I'm sick of it."

"Don't quarrel with your bread and butter."

"They pay so little for lessons. What's the use of a few coppers?" he answered, reluctantly, as though replying to his own thought.

"And you want to get a fortune all at once?"

He looked at her strangely.

"Yes, I want a fortune," he answered firmly, after a brief pause.

Man in General

"And what if I am wrong," he cried suddenly after a moment's thought. "What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind--then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."

Tears and Tribulation

"Why am I to be pitied, you say? Yes! there's nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, not pitied! Crucify me, oh judge, crucify me but pity me! And then I will go of myself to be crucified, for it's not merry-making I seek but tears and tribulation!. . Do you suppose, you that sell, that this pint of yours has been sweet to me? It was tribulation I sought at the bottom of it, tears and tribulation, and have found it, and I have tasted it; but He will pity us Who has had pity on all men, Who has understood all men and all things, He is the One, He too is the judge. He will come in that day and He will ask: 'Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive step-mother and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?' And He will say, 'Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once. . . . I have forgiven thee once. . . . Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much. . . .' And he will forgive my Sonia, He will forgive, I know it . . . I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now! And He will judge and will forgive all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek. . . . And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. 'You too come forth,' He will say, 'Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!' And we shall all come forth, without shame and shall stand before him. And He will say unto us, 'Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!' And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, 'Oh Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?' And He will say, 'This is why I receive them, oh ye wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.' And He will hold out His hands to us and we shall fall down before him . . . and we shall weep. . and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all! . . . and all will understand, Katerina Ivanovna even . . . she will understand. . . . Lord, Thy kingdom come!" And he sank down on the bench exhausted, and helpless, looking at no one, apparently oblivious of his surroundings and plunged in deep thought. His words had created a certain impression; there was a moment of silence; but soon laughter and oaths were heard again.

They Grieve Over Men

"Not on earth, but up yonder . . . they grieve over men, they weep, but they don't blame them, they don't blame them! But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don't blame!"

Drink to Suffer

"That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.. . I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!"

Forbidden by Science

"From compassion? But Mr. Lebeziatnikov who keeps up with modern ideas explained the other day that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that's what is done now in England, where there is political economy."

What Men Are Most Afraid Of

"Hm . . . yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most . . ."

Then and Now

THEN: "God explains everything, even evolution."

NOW:"Evolution explains everything, even God."

Our Descendants Will Complain

"Life has gotten dramatically better for almost everyone in the Western world during the past half-century, yet people are no happier. Centuries to come may see life better still, and happiness not increased."

***

"It is ours to decide what the future will hold. And if we decide well, the future may hold an ever-better life, about which our descendants will complain."

Art and Religion

"Like art, religion has been a way of containing feelings that might otherwise tear individuals and societies apart. Armstrong leans heavily on the distinction first made by the ancient Greeks between the realms of mythos and logos. Logos is "a pragmatic mode of thought that enables people to function effectively in the world"; it is what we rely on when organising society or planning a journey. However, logos has its limitations: "It cannot assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles." For this, there is the realm of mythos or myth, to which religion and art belong. Religion offers us moments of what Armstrong calls, using another Greek term, ekstasis, a stepping outside of the norm for the sake of release and consolation."

Review of The Case for God

The Case for God

"He is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God 'exists', because our concept of existence is too limited."

Not of Flesh, But of Bronze

"No, those men are not made so. The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh but of bronze!"

A Historical Living Process

“Listen, Rodion, and tell us your opinion. I want to hear it. I was fighting tooth and nail with them and wanted you to help me. I told them you were coming…It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organization and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted!…”

“You are wrong there,” cried Porfiry Petrovitch; he was noticeably animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him more excited than ever.

“Nothing is admitted,” Razumihin interrupted with heat.

“I am not wrong. I'll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognize that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is reactionary! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution of the problem! It's seductively clear and you musn't think about it. That's the great thing, you mustn't think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!”

Talk Your Own Nonsense

"And what made me get so tight? Because they got me into an argument, damn them! I've sworn never to argue! They talk such trash! I almost came to blows! I've left my uncle to preside. Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that's just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That's what they regard as the highest point of progress. If only their nonsense were their own, but as it is…”

“Listen!” Pulcheria Alexandrovna interrupted timidly, but it only added fuel to the flames.

“What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's. In the first case you are a man, in the second you're no better than a bird. Truth won't escape you, but life can be cramped. There have been examples. And what are we doing now? In science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aims, liberalism, judgment, experience and everything, everything, everything, we are still in the preparatory class at school. We prefer to live on other people's ideas, it's what we are used to! Am I right, am I right?” cried Razumihin, pressing and shaking the two ladies’ hands.

Culture and Philosophy

Culture is a productivity tool. It can record and convey successful ideas to new generations. But culture can just as easily prevent and destroy successful ideas, too. For evolution, culture can be either an express lane or a dead end.

Art, science, and commerce adorn philosophy. A poor philosophy goes about in rags; a better one dresses well.

No Army Since Caesar

"Confederate defenders expected the swamps in tidewater South Carolina to stop Sherman before he got fairly started. Indeed, so far under water were the roads in this region that Union scouts had to reconnoiter some of them in canoes. But Sherman organized 'pioneer battalions' of soldiers and freedmen (some of the latter recruited from the thousands of contrabands who had trailed the army to Savannah) to cut saplings and trees to corduroy the roads, build bridges, and construct causeways. Meeting resistance from Wheeler's cavalry at some rain-swollen streams and rivers, the bluecoats sent out flanking columns that waded through water up to their armpits, brushing aside alligators and snakes, and drove the rebels away. Northward lapped the blue wave at a rate of nearly ten miles a day for forty-five days including skirmishing and fighting. Rain fell during twenty-eight of those days, but this seemed to benefit South Carolina only by slightly damping the style of Sherman's arsonists. 'When I learned that Sherman's army was marching through the Salk swamps, making its own corduroy roads at the rate of a dozen miles a day,' said Joseph Johnston, 'I made up my mind that there had been no army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar.'"

Ten Times More Difficult

"Even more important, perhaps, than the destructive vengeance of Sherman's army in spreading this demoralization was its stunning logistical achievements. Sherman himself later rated the march through the Carolinas as ten times more important in winning the war than the march from Atlanta to the sea. It was also ten times more difficult. Terrain and weather posed much greater problems in South Carolina than in Georgia. The march from Atlanta to Savannah proceeded 285 miles parallel to major rivers in dry autumn weather against token opposition. The march northward from Savannah was aimed at Goldsboro, North Carolina, 425 miles away, where Sherman expected to be resupplied by Union forces moving inland from Wilmington. Sherman's soldiers would have to cross nine substantial rivers and scores of their tributaries during what turned out to be the wettest winter in twenty years."

I Am a Contradiction

At first glance, I am a contradiction: a libertarian who who was raised on social security survivor's benefits; a graduate of public schools; and a graduate of a public university. Surely, if any one life can demonstrate the virtues of a progressive social system, my life does. Surely, only an ingrate would criticize a system that gave him so much.

But we don't get to choose our beginnings, only our destinations.

Not Pretty, and Hardly Glorious

"The war of plunder and arson in South Carolina was not pretty, and hardly glorious, but Sherman considered it effective. The terror his bummers inspired 'was a power, and I intended to utilize it....My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses and make them fear and dread us.' It seemed to work: 'All is gloom, despondency, and inactivity,' wrote a South Carolinian on February 28. 'Our army is demoralized and the people panic stricken....the power to do has left us...to fight longer seems to be madness.'"

Few Escaped

"Destroyed it [South Carolina] was, through a corridor from south to north narrower than in Georgia but more intensely pillaged and burned. Not many buildings remained standing in some villages after the army marched through. The same was true of the countryside. 'In Georgia few houses were burned,' wrote an officer; 'here few escaped.' A soldier felt confident that South Carolina 'will never want to seceed again....I think she has her 'rights' now.'

South Carolina Must Be Destroyed

"At the beginning of 1865 the only sizable portions of the Confederate heartland still untouched by invading Yankees were the interior of the Carolinas and most of Alabama. Grant and Thomas planned a two-pronged campaign to deal with the latter...

Destructive as these enterprises were, they became a sideshow to Sherman's march through South Carolina. As his army had approached Savannah in December 1864, Georgians said to Sherman: 'Why don't you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way? They started it.' Sherman had intended to do so all along. He converted Grant to the idea, and on February 1, Sherman's 60,000 blue avengers left Savannah for their second march through the heart of enemy territory. This one had two strategic purposes: to destroy all war resources in Sherman's path; and to come up on Lee's rear to crush the Army of Northern Virginia in a vise between two larger Union armies and 'wipe out Lee,' in Grant's succinct phrase.

Sherman's soldiers had a third purpose in mind as well: to punish the state that had hatched this unholy rebellion. The soldiers' temper was not improved by the taunts of southern newspapers against this 'grand army of Mudsills.' one of the mudsills, an Ohio private, vowed to make South Carolina 'suffer worse than she did at the time of the Revolutionary War. We will let her know that it isn't so sweet to secede as she thought it would be.' A South Carolina woman whose house was plundered recalled that the soldiers 'would sometimes stop to tell me they were sorry for the women and children, but South Carolina must be destroyed."

Vita Brevis

"Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile."

"Art is long, life short, opportunity fleeting, experiment dangerous, and judgement difficult."

A Hard Rule

"The test of merit in my profession, with the people, is success. It is a hard rule, but I think it right."

Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, 1862

The Word of God

Of course we all should obey the word of God, once we all agree on exactly what He said.

Manifestation of the Spirit

I like to read the following passage from the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians as an early recognition of the utility of dispersed knowledge and a celebration of the spontaneous order.

"There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; 
there are different forms of service but the same Lord;
there are different workings but the same God
who produces all of them in everyone.
To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit
is given for some benefit.

As a body is one though it has many parts,
and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body,
so also Christ."

The Rising Marginal Cost of Originality

"Suppose you are the two hundred and ninetieth city planner in the history of the world. All the good ideas have been used, all the so-so ideas have been used, and you need something new to make your reputation. You design Canberra. That done, you design the Combs building at ANU, the most ingeniously misdesigned building in my personal experience, where after walking around for a few minutes you not only don't know where you are, you don't even know what floor you are on.

I call it the theory of the rising marginal cost of originality—formed long ago when I spent a summer visiting at ANU.

It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn't worth looking at, modern music isn't worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen's, or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used, and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.

Of course, there might be a reason nobody else has used it."

From www.daviddfriedman.blogspot.com

A Suitable Hard Drive

"I have learned that people are uploading their lives into cyberspace and am convinced that one day all human knowledge and memory will exist on a suitable hard drive which, for preservation, will be flung out of the solar system to orbit a galaxy far, far away."

Fish-a-tarian

"Then I would have a room-service dinner, and the only thing on the hotel menu that fit my fish-a-tarian diet was breaded fried shrimp with the texture of sandpaper, really just a ketchup delivery system."

A Good Time Tonight

"Well, we've had a good time tonight, considering we're all going to die someday."

Death-Thing

"I'm so depressed today. I just found out this 'death-thing' applies to me."

Consistently Good

"The constant work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances."

They Don't Get It

"In his standard warm-up for the studio audience, when he was asked, 'Do they get this show in Omaha?' Steve [Allen] would answer, "They see it, but they don't get it."

This is Funny

"This is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet."

Charging Up

"Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."

Necessary Naivete

"Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do."

Perseverance

"Perseverance is a great substitute for talent."

Part of Life's Routine

"One day I was particularly gloomy, and Jim asked me what the matter was. I told him my high school girlfriend (for all of two weeks) had broken up with me. He said, "Oh, that'll happen a lot." The knowledge that this horrid grief was simply a part of life's routine cheered me up almost instantly."

The Thinking Man's Religion

Art becomes the thinking man's religion; artists, his prophets; and professors, his high priests.

Where the Shadows Fall

It is impossible to say that you know a place until you know where the shadows fall.

Against Cosmic Odds

When we are young, we believe life is something that can be torn from us only by a force of cosmic injustice. But as we age, we come to understand that one life is not nature's default. Life itself may be, but one life is not. One life is something held together for a little while, against cosmic odds.

Formula for Greatness

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

What is Necessary in Things

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."

That Horrid Draught

"Anna Sergyevna was a rather strange creature. Having no prejudices of any kind, having no strong convictions even, she never gave way or went out of her way for anything. She had seen many things very clearly; she had been interested in many things, but nothing had completely satisfied her; indeed, she hardly desired complete satisfaction. Her intellect was at the same time inquiring and indifferent; her doubts were never soothed to forgetfulness, and they never grew strong enough to distract her. Had she not been rich and independent, she would perhaps have thrown herself into the struggle, and have known passion. But life was easy for her, though she was bored at times, and she went on passing day after day with deliberation, never in a hurry, placid, and only rarely disturbed. Dreams sometimes danced in rainbow colours before her eyes even, but she breathed more freely when they died away, and did not regret them. Her imagination indeed overstepped the limits of what is reckoned permissible by conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.… Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink into herself, and feel plaintive and almost angry, and there was only one thing she cared for at that instant—to get away from that horrid draught."

Loyalty and Love

Here are the final words of George Orwell's chilling novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the character Winston Smith is finally reconciled with Big Brother, at the very moment of Smith's execution.

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

Big Brother appears when a leader asks us for loyalty and love more than independence; it continues until it has convinced us to participate in our own destruction; it ends only when we dare to disagree with what we know is wrong, refuse to love what is unlovable, and insist on our right to be left alone.

Through the Fire

Anna Sergyevna went very rarely to the town, generally only on business, and even then she did not stay long. She was not liked in the province; there had been a fearful outcry at her marriage with Odintsov, all sorts of fictions were told about her; it was asserted that she had helped her father in his cardsharping tricks, and even that she had gone abroad for excellent reasons, that it had been necessary to conceal the lamentable consequences … ‘You understand?’ the indignant gossips would wind up. ‘She has gone through the fire,’ was said of her; to which a noted provincial wit usually added: ‘And through all the other elements?’

The Courage to Believe in Nothing

"I shall be very curious to see the man who has the courage to believe in nothing."

A Humble Faith

Why should reason be offended at a humble faith, especially when reason more than anything else allows us to comprehend how little one man can understand; or when faith dares to call that vast ignorance God?

The Evidence of a Father

I grew up surrounded by the evidence of a father who died before I could remember him. Visits to his grave, photographs of him, his paintings, his brushes, his tubes of paint, his drawing tools, his books, the table he built and meticulously decorated, the sofa he made from the front seat of a Chevy, the lamp he made, and always the stories about him from my mother, my aunts, and my uncles. He was dead, but something about him was in every room and the very structure of that house, as real as the walls and doors. Death leaves an absence, but it transforms what remains.

Not a Temple

"The only good point in a Russian is his having the lowest possible opinion of himself. What does matter is that two and two make four, and the rest is all foolery."

"And is nature foolery?" said Arkady, looking pensively at the bright-coloured fields in the distance, in the beautiful soft light of the sun, which was not yet high up in the sky.

"Nature, too, is foolery in the sense you understand it. Nature’s not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it."

Regrets Akin to Hopes

"Nikolai Petrovitch had lost his wife, Pavel Petrovitch had lost his memories; after the death of the princess he tried not to think of her. But to Nikolai, there remained the sense of a well-spent life, his son was growing up under his eyes; Pavel, on the contrary, a solitary bachelor, was entering upon that indefinite twilight period of regrets that are akin to hopes, and hopes that are akin to regrets, when youth is over, while old age has not yet come.

This time was harder for Pavel Petrovitch than for another man; in losing his past, he lost everything."

Getting Ready to be Great

"Madame Kukshin, too, went abroad. She is in Heidelberg, and is now studying not natural science, but architecture, in which, according to her own account, she has discovered new laws. She still fraternises with students, especially with the young Russians studying natural science and chemistry, with whom Heidelberg is crowded, and who, astounding the naïve German professors at first by the soundness of their views of things, astound the same professors no less in the sequel by their complete inefficiency and absolute idleness. In company with two or three such young chemists, who don’t know oxygen from nitrogen, but are filled with scepticism and self-conceit, and, too, with the great Elisyevitch, Sitnikov roams about Petersburg, also getting ready to be great, and in his own conviction continues the ‘work’ of Bazarov. There is a story that some one recently gave him a beating; but he was avenged upon him; in an obscure little article, hidden in an obscure little journal, he has hinted that the man who beat him was a coward. He calls this irony. His father bullies him as before, while his wife regards him as a fool … and a literary man."

Life Without End

"There is a small village graveyard in one of the remote corners of Russia. Like almost all our graveyards, it has a melancholy look; the ditches surrounding it have long been overgrown; grey wooden crosses have fallen askew and rotted under their once painted gables; the gravestones are all out of position, just as if someone had pushed them from below; two or three bare trees hardly provide some meager shade; the sheep wander unchecked among the tombs . . . But among them is one grave untouched by human beings and not trampled on by any animal; only the birds perch on it and sing at daybreak. An iron railing surrounds it and two young fir trees have been planted there, one at each end; Evgeny Bazarov is buried in this tomb. Often from the near-by village two frail old people come to visit it--a husband and wife. Supporting one another, they walk with heavy steps; they go up to the iron railing, fall on their knees and weep long and bitterly, and gaze intently at the silent stone under which their son lies buried; they exchange a few words, wipe away the dust from the stone or tidy up some branches of a fir tree, then start to pray again and cannot tear themselves away from that place where they seem to be nearer to their son, to their memories of him . . . Can it be that their prayers and their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred devoted love, is not all powerful? Oh, no! However passionate, sinful or rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they tell us not only of eternal peace, of that great peace of "indifferent" nature; they tell us also of eternal reconciliation and of life without end."

A Man Can Understand Everything

"A man can understand everything--how the ether vibrates, and what's going on in the sun; but why someone else blows his nose differently, that he is incapable of understanding."

The Great Dilemma

I have learned that the great dilemma in life is knowing when to exercise my will, and when to accept my fate; and that, sometimes, the two are really the same thing. From every act of will springs a forest of fateful consequences; and every fateful consequence is the raw timber of a new act of will. 

A Life Too Dangerous

Theater allows us to experience a way of living too dangerous to actually live just yet. 

Other People's Lives

We love obituaries. Other people become so much more interesting once they're dead. 

Couplet

Like fire upon the polar shelf

Creation must consume itself. 

The Lucky Ones

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born."

The Root of All Evil (Part 2). The quote occurs around 46:50.

Madame le Professeur

Sing oh goddess, of misery and pain,
In windowless rooms of no forgiveness
Bunkers of the lost in a losing war,
Bring forth her stories lost with urgent need
Power denied the able in the world
With words that are not and can never be
Her words, the maternal voice unconstrained
Abandoned hymns to her name undefiled
Behind the slave-name made by her father
Whose nature had to own the things he saw,
How she had to make a world of her own
Of feminine light and masculine shade,
She who would rather be a witch than wife
Who traded uncanny knowledge for gold
Who rose up to challenge facts and phrases
The brutal instruments of her abuse
A contest to control her mind and will
To trade her body and cripple her with
Fear, until there was nothing left to trade,
How she would prefer things be different
But can’t let heal the bloody scabs of wrongs
The injustice of her place outside time
An actor in another’s play, a plot
Concealed but drawn deliberately vast
Appearing, deceptively, as kindness
As respect, as worship, even as love
A trick to make her think she is happy;
Courtesy is a wall to keep her out,
The trap of romance designed to get her
To ignore a long list of cruelties
A horror penetrating her long dream
The irrefutable proof of her worst fears
Her womb bruised by crimes of the wombless.

Tales of Immeasurable Consolation

What does religion offer us? Not facts, but tales of immeasurable consolation.

Ah, Women

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

Not the Past Itself

As a child, I was drawn to places and things abandoned by adults. I did not seek these for what they were. I sought them for what I imagined them to be. Perhaps all children live this way, even some adults, especially those who want to relive old happiness or settle old scores. For it is not the past itself that we seek, but what we imagine about it.

We Live Here

We live here. Only here, and nowhere else. But where we are is connected to a past that we continuously re-imagine, and a future that is filled with surprises. It turns out that "here" is more than one place at once. Perhaps that is the meaning of eternal life. It is too vast for any single life, and any single life is too small to contain more than just a few bits of it. 

Like New

Death is an old joke, but it comes like new to everyone.

The Romantic Structure of the Earth

"...he loved the romantic structure of the earth which filled his pockets with chinking coins."

Neither Poem Nor Novel

A few thoughts on re-reading Look Homeward, Angel. 

Wolfe's style is an unfortunate example of what happens when a born poet tries to write a great novel. The result is neither poem nor novel, but a mosaic of both genres, a strained ambition to contain everything in a single narrative. It might have been a great series of poems. It might have even been a great novel.

Wolfe is a random adverb generator. They appear in his sentences at the most unexpected places. "Remembering speechlessly," "He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully," "A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach," and "The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent" are four examples from nearly the first page.

Finally, Wolfe believed in full employment for adjectives. Why use one when two or three might be lying around out of work? 

The Fruit of Forty Thousand Years

"Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time."

I Made Him Happy

"You were hastening his death, carrying him to the extreme frenzy, the consumption of all the senses. And you were satisfying your own taste for fairy tales: you were proud of your inventions."

"Perhaps. But for the short while he still lived, I made him happy."

Arrival and Ground Transportation

1.

I entered San Francisco between two ages

A young woman who overplayed the bitch

A nearsighted old man who read the news

Like he had to smell the meaning of each word.

In the awkward intimacy of strangers

Closer than friends

We tried to think of something else.

It takes a day and nearly $900 to get here

Five hours in coach, $2 headphones, two movies

Three beverage carts, four cookies, two bags of peanuts

Three new time zones, two trips to the lavatory, no meal

And always the recirculated, desiccated, and odorous air.

An arm’s length away

Outside our little metal cloud

Life was impossible.

2.

On the edge of the continent

Alone in a dark seat on the dark side of earth

I rode away in a balm of luxurious darkness

Under storm clouds the weight of one atmosphere

A black sea containing all the names of creation

Past rooms with open windows and shaded lamps

Like aids to navigation, the lights of homes

Where people hammer out of darkness

Chains of meaning released into the world
A grammar made from darkness and surrendered to it.

Koan from The Gateless Gate

趙州、因僧問、其甲乍入叢林。
A monk said to Jõshû, "I have just entered this monastery.
乞師指示。
Please teach me."
州云、喫粥了也未。
"Have you eaten your rice porridge?" asked Jõshû.
僧云、喫粥了也。
"Yes, I have," replied the monk.
州云、洗鉢盂去。
"Then you had better wash your bowl," said Jõshû.
其僧有省。
With this the monk gained insight.

The Cardinal Virtues

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

A Rare Smile of Eternal Reassurance

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

Pages and Everything

On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

Testimony to Romantic Speculation

We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The Meaning of Death

"Does death have any meaning? 

Well, yes, it does. Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love."

Its Own Improbability

"I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence." (pg. 59)

Getting Something to Happen

"Life, we can now say, is getting something to happen against the odds and remembering how to do it." (pg. 63)

All There is to Biochemistry

"And that's basically all there is to biochemistry. Every cell is packed with thousands of different kinds of enzymes, each enzyme displaying a distinctive surface topology...and each thereby able to catalyze one or several specific chemical reactions." (pg. 39)

Self Assembly

"Amino acids that prefer to be next to one another, like a group of greasy ones, might associate to form one domain; amino acids with negative charges might line up next to amino acids with positive charges to form a second domain; a bulky amino acid might cause a protuberant domain to stick out farther. This all happens spontaneously -- the process is called self-assembly -- and the result is a protein with a distinctive overall shape and size that displays a collection of very specific domains." 

A Long, Existential Shudder

"We are told that life is so many manifestations of chemistry and we shudder, a long existential shudder." (pg. 33)

Our Thermal and Chemical Circumstances

"Life from non life, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances." (pg. 28-29)

A Simplicity of Heart

Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

The Inexhaustible Variety of Life

"...high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

The Edge of Stale Ideas

As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York.” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

A Beautiful Little Fool

“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘all right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Deep Books and Long Words

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them."

The Dramatic Turbulence

I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

Consoling Proximity of Millionaires

I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Fine Health

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. (Chapter 1)

Freedom of the Neighborhood

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. (Chapter 1)

Delayed Teutonic Migration

I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man.

A Matter of Infinite Hope

"...the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth." (pg. 1)

The Mind of Man is Capable of Anything

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the night of first ages -- could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but truth -- truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder -- the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff -- with his own in-born strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags -- rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row -- is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.

The Sums Not Counted

"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas."

The Unpardonable Sin

After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that's supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin. No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump -- eh? A blow on the very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and think of it -- years after -- and go hot and cold all over. (pg. 104)

Unfair Competition

"We will not be free from unfair competition till one of these fellows is hanged for an example,' he said. 'Certainly,' grunted the other; 'get him hanged! Why not? Anything -- anything can be done in this country." (pg. 101)

A Single Window

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

What Foul Dust Floated in the Wake of His Dreams

No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

The Middle-Aged Married Man's Lament

for P.J. O’Rourke

The IRS wants more from me
Back taxes and a penalty.

My kids think I'm an ATM
And my account belongs to them.

They tell me that I’m old and square
They laugh because I’ve lost my hair.

Tuition bills are coming soon
I’ll pay them with a five year balloon.

The van needs oil, brakes and tires
I wonder when that tag expires?

My ex-wife wants a bigger check
My new wife wants a bigger deck.

Sometime this year I’ll cut the grass
And get that woman off my ass.

She tells me I must lose some weight
No booze, no bars, and no debate.

That’s typical of all her sex
What’s good today is bad the next.

Fat cheeks are cute in L&D
A diaper’s great for poop and pee.

A woman just can’t help her heart
She thinks it’s cute when babies fart.

But when you’re old, she’s not so sweet.
She’ll push your wheelchair in the street.

Fart once at dinner with a guest
She'll squash you like a little pest.

Assessing your resolve and mass

She'll sent you to aerobics class.

And she will not appreciate
That pin-up of your first prom date.

She'll hate the smell and steady glow
Of every brand of Maduro.

So if my flight should crash and burn
Don’t waste your tears on me
Just tell my quack I won’t return
For that endoscopy.

I'll check off what I unachieved
And have a jubilee
Smiling like a man reprieved
A prisoner set free.

I’ll laugh throughout that final dive
Relieved of all my fear
And if you should find me alive
Don’t tell them I’m still here.

Eldorado Exploring Expedition

"This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of fore-sight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.

My Influential Friend

It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit -- to find out what I could do. No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work -- no man does -- but I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself. Your own reality -- for yourself, not for others -- what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means." (pg. 96-97)

We Live Alone

". . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence -- that which makes its truth, its meaning -- its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream -- alone. . . ." (pg. 95)

Something in the World

"By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter." (pg. 91)

The Redeeming Facts of Life

"I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion." (pg. 89)

The Meanings of Words

People change the meanings of their words as easily as they change the coins in their pockets.

A Place More Beautiful

"Is there perhaps any place more beautiful in the world than this, where, even if something ugly exists, you don't see it?" (pg. 340)

A Kind of Power

"Triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself." (pg. 88)

An Insoluble Mystery From the Sea

"A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice; but these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea." (pg. 80)

Voice of the Surf

The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning. (pg. 78)

A Fine Figure of a Man

A Frenchman, Mr. Astley, is merely a fine figure of a man. With this you, as a Britisher, may not agree. With it I also, as a Russian, may not agree--out of envy. Yet possibly our good ladies are of another opinion. For instance, one may look upon Racine as a broken-down, hobbledehoy, perfumed individual--one may even be unable to read him; and I too may think him the same, as well as, in some respects, a subject for ridicule. Yet about him, Mr. Astley, there is a certain charm, and, above all things, he is a great poet--though one might like to deny it. Yes, the Frenchman, the Parisian, as a national figure, was in process of developing into a figure of elegance before we Russians had even ceased to be bears. The Revolution bequeathed to the French nobility its heritage, and now every whippersnapper of a Parisian may possess manners, methods of expression, and even thoughts that are above reproach in form,while all the time he himself may share in that form neither in initiative nor in intellect nor in soul--his manners, and the rest, having come to him through inheritance. Yes, taken by himself, the Frenchman is frequently a fool of fools and a villain of villains.

Acquiring Capital

“I think that roulette was devised specially for Russians,” I retorted; and when the Frenchman smiled contemptuously at my reply I further remarked that I was sure I was right; also that, speaking of Russians in the capacity of gamblers, I had far more blame for them than praise — of that he could be quite sure.

“Upon what do you base your opinion?” he inquired.

“Upon the fact that to the virtues and merits of the civilised Westerner there has become historically added — though this is not his chief point — a capacity for acquiring capital; whereas, not only is the Russian incapable of acquiring capital, but also he exhausts it wantonly and of sheer folly. None the less we Russians often need money; wherefore, we are glad of, and greatly devoted to, a method of acquisition like roulette — whereby, in a couple of hours, one may grow rich without doing any work. This method, I repeat, has a great attraction for us, but since we play in wanton fashion, and without taking any trouble, we almost invariably lose.”

“To a certain extent that is true,” assented the Frenchman with a self-satisfied air.

“Oh no, it is not true,” put in the General sternly. “And you,” he added to me, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself for traducing your own country!”

“I beg pardon,” I said. “Yet it would be difficult to say which is the worst of the two — Russian ineptitude or the German method of growing rich through honest toil.”

“What an extraordinary idea,” cried the General.

“And what a RUSSIAN idea!” added the Frenchman.

I smiled, for I was rather glad to have a quarrel with them.

“I would rather live a wandering life in tents,” I cried, “than bow the knee to a German idol!”

“To WHAT idol?” exclaimed the General, now seriously angry.

“To the German method of heaping up riches. I have not been here very long, but I can tell you that what I have seen and verified makes my Tartar blood boil. Good Lord! I wish for no virtues of that kind. Yesterday I went for a walk of about ten versts; and, everywhere I found that things were even as we read of them in good German picture-books — that every house has its ‘Fater,’ who is horribly beneficent and extraordinarily honourable. So honourable is he that it is dreadful to have anything to do with him; and I cannot bear people of that sort. Each such ‘Fater’ has his family, and in the evenings they read improving books aloud. Over their roof-trees there murmur elms and chestnuts; the sun has sunk to his rest; a stork is roosting on the gable; and all is beautifully poetic and touching. Do not be angry, General. Let me tell you something that is even more touching than that. I can remember how, of an evening, my own father, now dead, used to sit under the lime trees in his little garden, and to read books aloud to myself and my mother. Yes, I know how things ought to be done. Yet every German family is bound to slavery and to submission to its ‘Fater.’ They work like oxen, and amass wealth like Jews. Suppose the ‘Fater’ has put by a certain number of gulden which he hands over to his eldest son, in order that the said son may acquire a trade or a small plot of land. Well, one result is to deprive the daughter of a dowry, and so leave her among the unwedded. For the same reason, the parents will have to sell the younger son into bondage or the ranks of the army, in order that he may earn more towards the family capital. Yes, such things ARE done, for I have been making inquiries on the subject. It is all done out of sheer rectitude — out of a rectitude which is magnified to the point of the younger son believing that he has been RIGHTLY sold, and that it is simply idyllic for the victim to rejoice when he is made over into pledge. What more have I to tell? Well, this — that matters bear just as hardly upon the eldest son. Perhaps he has his Gretchen to whom his heart is bound; but he cannot marry her, for the reason that he has not yet amassed sufficient gulden. So, the pair wait on in a mood of sincere and virtuous expectation, and smilingly deposit themselves in pawn the while. Gretchen’s cheeks grow sunken, and she begins to wither; until at last, after some twenty years, their substance has multiplied, and sufficient gulden have been honourably and virtuously accumulated. Then the ‘Fater’ blesses his forty-year-old heir and the thirty-five-year-old Gretchen with the sunken bosom and the scarlet nose; after which he bursts, into tears, reads the pair a lesson on morality, and dies. In turn the eldest son becomes a virtuous ‘Fater,’ and the old story begins again. In fifty or sixty years’ time the grandson of the original ‘Fater’ will have amassed a considerable sum; and that sum he will hand over to, his son, and the latter to HIS son, and so on for several generations; until at length there will issue a Baron Rothschild, or a ‘Hoppe and Company,’ or the devil knows what! Is it not a beautiful spectacle — the spectacle of a century or two of inherited labour, patience, intellect, rectitude, character, perseverance, and calculation, with a stork sitting on the roof above it all? What is more; they think there can never be anything better than this; wherefore, from their point of view they begin to judge the rest of the world, and to censure all who are at fault — that is to say, who are not exactly like themselves. Yes, there you have it in a nutshell. For my own part, I would rather grow fat after the Russian manner, or squander my whole substance at roulette. I have no wish to be ‘Hoppe and Company’ at the end of five generations. I want the money for MYSELF, for in no way do I look upon my personality as necessary to, or meet to be given over to, capital. I may be wrong, but there you have it. Those are MY views.”