Hi all,
I just came across this quote in a book review by Anthony Marra in the August 10, NYT Book Review. Mara was reviewing a novel that deals with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He says, "We come to understand that time is a solvent that can convert even failure into states of grace."
This quote jumped out at me as a variation on Charles Yu's quote, "Time is a machine. It will convert your pain into experience."
Time seems able to do just about anything except go backwards.
Get out your highlighters and mark up your books for these periodic quotation collections. Remember, the quote, the source (NikolaiFyodorov), and why you chose it, if there's a reason.
I'm shouting out only the unofficial rotating quotesporn committee, OftenBen flagamuffin galen. Others, check the tag for some wonderful stuff. Edit fixed shoutouts.
- Jack Kerouac,
On the RoadAnd for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment.
Absolutely. It blew my mind when I read it. Here was this book which I expected to be all plot, just a story of Kerouac's travels across the U.S., and then suddenly he phase-shifts from the physical realm into a direct experience of psychedelic quintessence. Though you can't discern it from the quote I posted, this whole passage happens right in the middle of a relatively mundane event. Sal Paradise (Kerouac) is wandering around the streets of San Francisco with no real purpose when he suddenly starts to interpret strange meanings in people and things around him, and then dives into this ecstatic reverie before slipping out of it and returning his awareness to his wandering the streets picking up cigarette butts and smoking them. I was on a train in Japan when I read it--on my way to go see a music festival in Osaka with my sister--and I had to put the book down for a minute and take a look around at where I was. It was like the passage directly mirrored my experience of reading the book: I was traveling through an unfamiliar place when my awareness shifted away from my surroundings into the orthogonal space of Kerouac's imagination. I got this weird, familiar sense of universality.
Does he? It's been awhile. If I can distract you a moment didn't Kerouac take offense to how his book was interpreted? Wasn't he making fun of all the posers? The faux beatniks pretending to give a shit about the counterculture?
That's all pretty accurate -- all he ever was was a homeless drunk who liked to make memories and had a gift for writing them down. Parallels to Dylan ... important to remember that by the time On the Road was finally published Kerouac was a very different person. Had a Buddhist phase and was also drinking heavily.
A description of a strategy set forward by the fictional Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, a fellowship/support group for the physically handicapped/deformed for coping with social existence, by one of the attendees who is fielding questions on why they wear a veil: DFW, Infinite Jest There's a lot in here revolving around this concept of the double-bind (wherein two differing psychopathologies counter-act one another ie. agorophobic kleptomaniacs), consciousness and awareness leading to this meta-pathology as an emergent property of society and self-awareness, technology being used with futility to try and resolve inherent properties of society, a simulated-nuclear-end-of-times-simulation game played by 12 year olds called the Eschaton which reaches Catch-22 levels of hilarity, and... tennis. and film. Trying to get to the meat of this book with a quote feels pointless, but it's gotten sooo much better than last time I posted a quote.'What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others. You stick you hideous face right in there into the wine-tasting crowd's visual meatgrinder, you smile so wide it hurts and put out your hand and are extra gregarious and outgoing and exert yourself to appear totally unaware of the facial struggles of the people who are trying not to wince or stare or give away the fact that they can see that you're hideously, improbably deformed. You feign acceptance of your deformity. You take your desire to hide and conceal it under a mask of acceptance.'
'I am in here'
Milan Kundera: I originally read this in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but I came across it again today, quoted in Postwar by Tony Judt.Say what you will--the Communists were more intelligent. They had a grandiose program, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone would find his place...From the start there were people who realized they lacked the proper temperament for the idyll and wished to leave the country. But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity. Instead of going abroad, they went behind bars.
I just read this article by Sam Harris about lying to kids and this section stood out to me. I've asked a similar question of myself many times. If my world is more fun, more exciting, more mysterious if I accept certain fictions as reality, why shouldn't I believe in all sorts of fantastic things? Why shouldn't I believe that pixies will sour my milk? Other people know the truth of these things, but is my life so much worse if I believe? The reality we all experience day to day begins its construction when we're children. I definitely believe that fairy tales, and fiction in general have an immeasurable value, but only if they are acknowledged as fiction. The Santa debate, which Harris addresses directly, is a hard thing for me to wrap my head around. Were I to have children, I would want them to experience the few years of gentle naivete of believing in Santa, but I also wouldn't want them to ever believe that I would lie to them about what is ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN THE WORLD. I wouldn't be surprised if I were to learn that being lied to about Santa had some correlation to a child later becoming an atheist (If raised in a religious household). If my parents can lie about Santa, what makes any other thing for which they have no proof valid?I don’t remember whether I ever believed in Santa, but I was never tempted to tell my daughter that he was real. Christmas must be marginally more exciting for children who are duped about Santa—but something similar could be said of many phenomena about which no one is tempted to lie. Why not insist that dragons, mermaids, fairies, and Superman actually exist? Why not present the work of Tolkien and Rowling as history?
I think everyone remembers the exact moment that someone told them Santa wasn't real. It was Christmas morning, when I was 7. I'd been dead certain that I had heard Santa going back up the fireplace and went downstairs to check. Saw the presents and no one around. I was so happy that I finally(almost) caught him! My parents shot that theory down as soon as I said it. Sad day. Anyways, I don't think I would do the same to my own children. I wouldn't cold-hearted or anything. I would just tell them the story of Santa as adults know it. Tell them that they're still getting presents on Christmas morning and teach all the other traditions. The only reason they have to 'believe' is for Polar Express and Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer to make sense.
Eh, the fact is not all lies are created equal. It is far more detrimental to a child'd development to lie to them about history (i.e. Lord of the Rings actually happening) than to let them believe in Santa as a child. It's a cultural tradition, really, especially if you are in America (not sure what Christmas traditions are elsewhere). I don't see any harm from it, and I can't think of a single instance where this lie undermines the adult's authority in the eyes of the child. It certainly didn't for me.
I finally got a quiet moment on night shift to start a new book. After reading The Road I've been fascinated with McCarthy's style. - Cormac McCarthy, Blood MeridianOnly now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
Found some unexpected poetry just now: Talking, of course, about the ivory-billed woodpecker. From a book called American Ornithology, written in 1814.[They] have a dignity in them superior to the common herd of woodpeckers. Trees, shrubbery, orchards, rails, fence posts, and old prostrate logs, are all alike interesting to those, in their humble and indefatigable search for prey; but the royal hunter before us, scorns the humility of such situations, and seeks the most towering trees of the forest; seeming particularly attached to those prodigious cypress swamps whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted or moss-hung arms midway to the sky.
The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker They have a dignity in them
superior to the common woodpecker --
Trees, shrubbery, orchards, rails, fence posts,
and old prostrate logs,
are all alike interesting to those, in their humble search for prey;
Yup. Poetry. but the royal hunter before us,
scorns the humility of such situations, and seeks
the most towering trees of the forest;
those prodigious cypress swamps
whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted
or moss-hung arms
midway to the sky.
You can't go ten pages in almost any book written in the 19th century about anything without finding prose that could make spectacular verse. Something's got kaput in our education system if they taught everyone (except most women! and blacks! and poor people!) to write better in 1814 than they do two hundred years later.
Picked up Junkyard Ghost Revival today. Loving it so far. If my heart really broke every time I fell from love I'd be able to offer you confetti by now. But hearts don't break. They bruise and get better. You call 911 and tell them I'm having a fantastic time. This poem in particular spoke to me for two reasons: 1. (As most of you know) I've been dealing with a breakup recently. It's been kinda hard. 2. I decided recently to try and have a more positive outlook on life. Everything's just more fun that way.I'VE SEEN NEARLY EVERY CITY FROM A ROOFTOP, WITHOUT JUMPING.
Mona Lisa OverdriveYes, you captured them. The journey out, the building of walls, the long spiral in. They were about walls, weren't they? The labyrinth of blood, of family. The maze hung against the void, saying, We are that within, that without is other, here forever shall we dwell. And the darkness was there from the beginning... You found it repeatedly in the eyes of Marie-France, pinned it in a slow zoom against the shadowed orbits of the skull. Early on she ceased to allow her image to be recorded. You worked with what you had. You justified her image, rotated her through planes of light, planes of shadow, generated models, mapped her skull in grids of neon. You used special programs to age her images according to statistical models, animation systems to bring your mature Marie-France to life. You reduced her image to a vast but finite number of points and stirred them, let new forms emerge, chose those that seemed to speak to you... And then you went on to the others, to Ashpool and the daughter whose face frames your work, its first and final image.
#2, this one hit close to home: The Year of the FloodBernice said the West Coast was perfect for that because although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.
Breakfast of Champions is a must, and Sirens of Titan. God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater is delightfully strange also... Maybe you should read that first. Vonnegut liked to re-use his characters. Sometimes harshly. I think the only book I haven't read of his is Cat's Cradle, and that was because I traded it out at a USO.
From my buddy, who we'll call Bacon Tomato - Think about it. I will be.It's interesting that we live in a time where everything sexual towards women is offensive except 50 Shades of Grey which is celebrated as if it's god damn Shakespeare. A book where a man is abusive towards a woman and she develops into his slave. Or Titanic which had nudity for no reason.
