'Being kissed by Wyoming Knott is more definite than being married to most women'
-The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein.
I really like this quote because it leaves the exact mechanics of the kiss completely open to interpretation, but the reader knows EXACTLY the feeling he's describing. There's a reason that Heinlein is a master.
(I was re-reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress because I like how it portrays the development of an AI)
I think the potential dual meaning (earthly vs. spiritual gods), though I'm not sure if that's intended when viewed in context.
That's the one with the bizarre motif of the I Ching, which Dick uses to set off and emphasize his alternate historical timeline. I think JamesTiberiusKirk is right about the duality, actually. It's one line from an absolutely loaded passage.
Chilling.. but it sounds like a challenge to me.
And I agree, definitely should make this regular.
In a very recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik questions Whorfianism, a theory named after the author, Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist. Whorfianism came to mean the idea that our language forces us to see the world a certain way, and that different languages impose different world views on their speakers. Gopnik says from Word Magic: How much really gets lost in translation? BY Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 26, 2014 (full-text not available on line to non-subscribers)In truth, language seems less like a series of cells in which we are imprisoned than like a set of tools that help us escape: some of the files are rusty; some will open any door; and most you have to jiggle around in the lock. But sooner or later, most words work.
Languages that have evolved in distant times or places may differ extensively in their resources for dealing with one or another range of phenomena. What comes easily in one language may come hard in another, and this difference may echo significant dissimilarities in style and value. But examples like these, impressive as they occasionally are, are not so extreme but that the changes and the contrasts can be explained and described using the equipment of a single language. Whorf, wanting to demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to ours that Hopi and English cannot, as he puts it, "be calibrated," uses English to convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences. Kuhn is brilliant at saying what things were like before the revolution using -what else? -our post-revolutionary idiom. Donald Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme
ooo, I loved that article. I wanted to post it here a couple days ago, but it's one of the locked online articles. humanodon, you would like it, if you get the chance.
I've also heard the hypothesis that those different world views affect problem-solving. For example, might it be easier to solve a particular math problem while thinking in German rather than Farsi? The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis makes dying languages all the more tragic.different languages impose different world views on their speakers
Absolutely. It's impossible to even imagine the particular view of the world encompassed in a language. In the quote below, living in another language is described as being immersed in an alternate universe: "The more advanced second language learner often finds herself immersed in a sort of alternate universe. . . Part of what makes learning a second language so difficult is precisely this: the commitment one made early on in life to a particular cutting up of the world at its joints is hard to see as merely one possible commitment among many, and just as it is hard to see, it is hard to let go of.
- Louder than Words, Benjamin K. Bergen
"Everyone seamed to be guided by an "objective""scientific" view of life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved material body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge physically, and therefore no two people can ever really communicate except in the mode of ship's radio operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement. Unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and dies like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals. Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land. The scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian "virtue" ever was. That streetcar ride with Lila so long ago. That was the feeling. There was no way he could ever get to Lila or understand her and no way she could ever understand him because all this intellect and its relationships and products and contrivances intervened. They had lost some of their realness. They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: Paradise-->Paradise-->Paradise-->, but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself- and from each other." -Robert Pirsig's: Lila
Sweet jesus. I wanna know more about this Pirsig guy, it seems like his reception wasn't great. Is it worth reading this, and/or the Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? I love a fictional story with purpose but I don't have too much time to read (the shame, I know.)
I read Zen and was unimpressed; it was hailed as revelatory by a friend of mine, but seemed to offer no new insight.
I first read Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance and then Lila. I would recommend reading them in that order as Pirsig intended. The way he captures complex social mechanisms and examines them based off of their humanistic effect is genius and, for me, life changing. I couldn't encourage you enough to give this book a try. To me, this quote is Pirsig's epiphany about how what he call "an 'objective scientific' view of life" (reenforced by the common thought of his era) brought about an era of everyman-for-himself mentality and spiritual loneliness. The concepts he develops in his first and second book are intended to solve many of these perceptual problems inherent in western society by examining the issues brought up in everyday life and morally reacting to them (as he calls it, seeing and reacting to the highest level of "quality" in each moment). I am probably biased towards these books because I used the concepts in them to improve myself and therefore cannot reject them. I still believe that others can do the same. If you give them a try please get back to me and say what you thought about them, i've wanted to have some feedback from someone else for a while now.
OK, you sold me. I will tackle Motorcycle Maintenance ASAP and let you know! Thanks for the rec, it may take a while but once I'm done with finals I can get crackin'.
It taught me to live more in the moment and to not overanalyze my first-person experience of life. Reading it still gives me chills though.
I'm sorry I'm late! From one of my favorite short stories, by Dave Foster Wallace's Good Old Neon - What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another- word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions.
Man, I love that guy; it's a shame he killed himself. Infinite Jest has to be one of the best books I've ever read.
The closing line to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
From Teddy Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic" speech: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
"A sad soul can kill quicker, far quicker than a germ" - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I just dug this up out of nowhere and uh, you know, some context would be great
There really isn't any. It appears Dykes Timber was illegally cutting on Pittman's land. Other than that, Pittman is just a very unique individual.
This is the greatest single paragraph in the history of litigation: During Pittman's testimony, he was reprimanded on numerous occasions by the trial judge for his behavior. Several times Pittman claimed not to remember things because he was “10,000 narcotic pills along.” He also testified that he could not count all of the stumps because Dykes Timber had equipment that “was capable of clipping the trees off with pinchers below the surface of the soil.” Other testimony revealed that Pittman thought Dykes Timber was only authorized to enter his property “by helicopter.” Pittman also testified that he had eaten human flesh. The jury was certainly free to make its own credibility determinations, and it was not required to accept or believe the testimony of Pittman, Rockford, or Thames.
Not really a quote but...yeah. From Sex Criminals which was recommended to me by bfv in this thread. It's really freaking fantastic.
"The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital in equipment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capital in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of war). Total war is not only a war of annihilation but arises when annihilation takes as its "center" not only the enemy army, or the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy. The fact that the double investment can be made only under prior conditions of limited war illustrates the irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to develop total war." -Deleuze and Guattari, 1k Plateaus
Es Muss Sein. -Beethoven, then Minas Kundera as a gorgeous introduction that carries across as a theme to his well-known book, "The Eternal Lightness of Being." It Must Be, showing (imo) that the heavy, tremendous power of Beethoven and his String Quartet No16 could shake a concert hall with gravitas and the bellows of its significance... meanwhile.. calling out that this storm is all but a performance; the compositional pioneer is just an artist moreover a human, and it simply must be, immaterial and insignificant.. so why not make it loud. Wrote my term paper about it, took me way too long to find that book. Im a cheesy dude.
Check out this poem by Frank O'Hara, I believe _refugee_ showed it to me, but it could have been lil: I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab which is typical and not just of modern life mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves must lovers of Eros end up with Venus muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you how I hate disease, it's like worrying that comes true and it simply must not be able to happen in a world where you are possible my love nothing can go wrong for us, tell me SONG [1960]
-Barbara Tuchman, The March of FollyAs a contemporary Laocoon, the unavoidable Edmund Burke, perceived and said, "The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principal so-called of the Constitution." In short, although possession was of greater value than principle, nevertheless the greater was thrown away for the less, the unworkable pursued at the sacrifice of the possible. This phenomenon is one of the commonest of governmental follies.
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with DragonsMan wants to be the king o' the rabbits, he best wear a pair o' floppy ears.
The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl, born and bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort; his turban therefore confounded her not a little; and as it turned out that his attainments in English were exactly of the same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had happened to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting the reputed learning of her master (and doubtless giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth besides perhaps a few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to understand that there was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from the house. - Thomas de Quincey, 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'.
"Keep things at arm's length....If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to." ― Three Comrades, Erich Maria Remarque
He had always known what I did not know and
what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget.
-A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
"During the 1980's, the Reagan administration mounted a major propaganda campaign over alleged victims of "Yellow Rain" in Cambodia and Laos, claiming that chemical warfare had been employed there by the Soviet Union through its Vietnam proxy. This propaganda effort eventually collapsed following the U.S. Army's own inability to confirm this warfare and, more important, the finding that the alleged Yellow Rain was bee feces, not chemicals." -- Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
I.. wait.. so then Russia dropped bee poo over Southeast Asia? I would be less disturbed by an actual chemical attack, were they trying to fertilize the flower fields to death?
I have a couple from GRRM. “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.” - Tyrion Lannister
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say." - Tyrion Lannister
“Why should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints - the ground's too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more worms than I do...”
For the present is the point at which time touches eternity. - CS Lewis "The Screwtape Letters". Great exploration of perceived human vice by the way.
- The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein. This book has really made me re-think my outlook on life...and reinforced my long-held belief that dogs are better people than people.To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to. When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.
"Forget sad things," said George. "I always do," said Hazel.
“The thing about smart mother fuckers is that sometimes, they sound like crazy mother fuckers to stupid mother fuckers...” ― Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead And isn't it the truth, if you pardon his French, that is... (Is it cheating if what I'm reading is a comic? :P)
You know what love is? It's what you least expect. 'The Museum of Extraordinary Things' - Alice Hoffman