Just for today
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them Sam, I am.....
Just for today
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them Sam, I am.....
"I do not intend to tiptoe through life only to arrive safely at death"-anon
In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. He'd got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo, bankrupt and ruined, because he knew they were.
"The Half-Skinned Steer" - Annie Proulx
thought of two great quotes for today:
"now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices." (the picture of dorian gray- oscar wilde)
"im the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. its awful. if im on my way to the store to buy a new magazine even, and somebody asks me where im going, im liable to say im going to the opera. its terrible. so when i told old spencer i had to go to the gym to get my equipment and stuff, that was a sheer lie. i dont even keep my goddam equipment in the gym." (the catcher in the rye - j.d. salinger)
Yesterday I read Virginia Woolf's The Waves and I thought there were some startlingly beautiful phrases and passages.
A few:
"I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers."
"Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle."
"To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all."
"I am like a log slipping smoothly over some waterfall."
beyond good and evil (nietzsche)
"26
Every special human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the majority, where he can forget the customary rules about "human beings" for he is an exception to them, but for the single case where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these customary rules, as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense.
Anyone who, in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer with all the colours of distress green and gray with disgust, surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, provided he stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for knowledge. If he were, he would one day have to say to himself, "The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception, than I am, the exception", and he would make his way down and, above all, "inside."
The study of the average man long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company all company is bad company except with one's peers that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part the richest in disappointments. But if he's lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he will encounter real short cuts and ways of making his task easier. I'm referring to the so-called cynics and those who simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the "rule-bound" man in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses now and then they even wallow in books as if in their very own dung.
Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder or more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust: for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat or ape as in the Abb Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted and perhaps also the foulest man of his century, he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal quieter.
More frequently it happens that, as I've intimated, the scientific head is set on an ape's body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that's not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere where someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak "badly" of human beings not even in a nasty way there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation.
For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or god, or society), may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr. But in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man."
40
Everything profound loves masks. The most profound things even have a hatred for images and allegories. Shouldn't the right disguise in which the shame of a god walks around be something exactly opposite? A questionable question: it would be strange if some mystic or other had not ventured something like that on his own.
There are processes of such a delicate sort that people do well to bury them in something crude in order to make them unrecognizable. There are actions of love and of extravagant generosity, after which there is nothing more advisable than to grab a stick and give an eyewitness a good thrashing, in so doing we cloud his memory. Some people know how to befuddle or batter their own memory in order at least to take revenge on this single witness, shame is resourceful.
It is not the worst things that make people feel the worst shame. Behind the mask there is not only malice, there is so much goodness in cunning. I could imagine that a person who had something valuable and vulnerable to hide might roll through his life as coarse and round as an old green wine barrel with strong hoops. The delicacy of his shame wants it that way. For a person whose shame is profound runs into his fate and delicate decisions on pathways which few people ever reach and of whose existence those closest to him, his most intimate associates, must not know about. His mortal danger hides itself from their eyes and so does his confidence in life, as he regains it.
A person who is concealed in this way, who from instinct uses speaking for silence and keeping quiet and who is tireless in avoiding communication, wants and demands that, instead of him, a mask of him wanders around in the hearts and heads of his friends. And suppose he did not want that mask: one day his eyes would open to the fact that nonetheless there is a mask of him there and that that's a good thing. Every profound mind needs a mask; even more, around every profound mind a mask is continuously growing, thanks to the constant falseness, that is, the shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.
43
Are they new friends of the "truth," these emerging philosophers? That seems plausible enough: for all philosophers up to this point have loved their truths. But they certainly will not be dogmatists. It must go against their pride as well as their taste if their truth is supposed to be some truth for everyman and that's been the secret wish and deeper meaning of all dogmatic efforts up to now.
"My opinion is my opinion: someone else has no casual right to it", that's what a philosopher of the future will perhaps say. One must rid oneself of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour utters it. And how could there even be a "common good"! That expression contradicts itself: what can be common always has only little value.
In the end things must stand as they stand and as they have always stood: great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and shudders for the refined, and, to sum up all this in brief, everything rare for the rare. "
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
It was propped against the collar box and I lay listening to it. Hearing it, that is. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear. Like Father said down the long and lonely light-rays you might see Jesus walking, like. And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
From The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. We read this passage in class and almost everyone just sat in awe. I think it is incredible.
Little one, Fate might miscarry.
Little one, why do you tarry?
Little one, When May I marry you?
My little one.
Faulkner's on my list of American Lit.
how doth the little crocodile
improve his shinning tail
and pour the waters of the nile
on every golden scale
how cheerfully he seems to grin
how neatly spreads his claws
and welcomes little fishes in
with gently smiling jaws
Technically, one could not call this prose, as this passage comes from a book of non-fiction, but I wanted to share it nonetheless, a snip of Camus' beliefs on aesthetics:
selection from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O'BrienIt is merely a matter of being faithful to the rule of the battle. That thought may suffice to sustain a mind; it has supported and still supports the whole civilizations. War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. 'Art and nothing but art,' said Nietzsche, 'we have art in order not to die of the truth.'
In the experience that I am attempting to describe and to stress on several modes, it is certain that a new torment arises wherever another dies. The childish chasing after forgetfulness, the appeal of satisfaction are now devoid of echo. But the constant tension that keeps man face to face with the world, the ordered delirium that urges him to be receptive to everything, leave him another fever. In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else. At the same time, it has no more significance than the continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their lives. All try their hands at miming, at repeating, at re-creating the reality that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of our truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.
Wow, mono, that was... I have no words really. Wonderful passage, thanks for sharing.
"All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours." -Aldous Huxley
"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." -William Blake
I am disturbed by the fact that you think this is powerful writing, since I think it is dreadful. The words do not 'break down', because they lack cohesion in the first place, the meaning being no clearer at the end that it was at the outset. Apart from anything else, a waterfall is not an 'object'.Originally Posted by Lokasenna
Wordsworth does it so much better, (although not in prose).
Please could you explain what you mean by 'a really transcendent peice of emotion'??
My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months: many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms.
I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonised by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
[Final paragraphs, 'Wuthering Heights']
Glad to hear you enjoyed it, too. I plan to read The Myth of Sisyphus another time. Certain things one cannot understand at one point in life, sometimes never, and I doubt I understood every punctuation mark of Camus' philosophy, but I would love to give it another read; during so many times while reading it, I found myself staring into the air, then jumping back into my own skin, almost as if I had gone somewhere.
Perhaps not as much as her husband, Mary Shelley took a great part in the Romantic movement, and even a lot of the prose written in conjunction with this literary movement had an aesthetic quality, despite its subject matter. As well as this passage's content having some disturbing imagery in it, the whole of Frankenstein seems very unsettling; nonetheless, just as certain prose-poetry writers, like Thomas Hardy, could express such dark elements of literature in words by similes and metaphors and with elaborate language, so could Mary Shelley.I am disturbed by the fact that you think this is powerful writing, since I think it is dreadful. The words do not 'break down', because they lack cohesion in the first place, the meaning being no clearer at the end that it was at the outset. Apart from anything else, a waterfall is not an 'object'.
Wordsworth does it so much better, (although not in prose).
Please could you explain what you mean by 'a really transcendent peice of emotion'??
The passage, I agree, lacks cohesion, expressing little action (yet a lot of emotion) in so much space, but nearly every European writer of this era had that trend; the plot of every one of Charles Dickens' works, I think, could get condensed into short stories, after subtracting all the fluffy language, dissecting the over-description of every item within a character's sensorium, and tossing away every unnecessary reminiscence of every fictional character, big or small. We could not do this, however, just as publishers chronically abridge many novels - it takes away from the beauty of its work, even if half, or more, of Shelley's and Dickens' words in their novels seem irrelevant.
It is quite a convoluted way of expressing the emotion though.
Agreed. And let's not overlook the dreadful comma placement, e.g. "Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable".
But I'm glad that it speaks to you, Lokasenna. It's just not my favourite writing style at all. I derive great pleasure from short, bare, incisive declarative sentences: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new' (opening sentence of Murphy).
See also the opening paragraph of Notes from the Underground:
'I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!'
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