The slower your hand, the more times you need to move the pea under the walnut shell. What skill lacks, numerous steps compensate. Also with a weak argument. If one cannot plausibly get from A to C, one proceeds from A to D and onto Z and then to B, hoping time and distance do what reason can’t.
*
Pity or the taking pleasure in another’s suffering. Both pity and cruelty have the same psychic precondition: a deep feeling for the other person’s state and for the subtle changes that can be brought about by the smallest manipulations. And neither aims at the other person’s good and is usually indifferent to it. The two are often found in the same person.
*
Worry. A constant mulling over a probability with the vague hope that the mulling itself will decrease its probability along with its fearsomeness. But why worry at all? Worry brings the dreaded possibility alive and nourishes it. It saps life. It changes nothing, but extends the agony of a future event into the present.
*
Schiller in Aesthetic Education noted the twin depravities—the crude lawless instincts of the plebs and the perverse, enervating habits of the civilized. We have today a growing, single middling class in which the two depravities are joined.
*
Why do animals taste good? Why do I taste good to animals? It would not appear to be in my evolutionary interest to have a flesh that other species find succulent. Nor in their interest to have such a tasty body. Some plants, for example those with hard seeds, benefit by inducing animals to eat and then spread their seeds about as some flowers, tasting sweet, induce insects to spread their pollen. But the good taste of an antelope’s flesh or that of the sea scallop would point to something else, to a grand harmonious chain whereby each member “consents” to sacrifice part of itself for the maintenance and growth of the interlinked web of life. I, you, all “agree” to taste good at least to some others.
*
The mendacity that is the warp and woof of society and politics—the deceit, the dissembling, hypocrisy, fraud and so on that is as much our element as water is to fish—could not be sustained for a day if those whose element it is did not prefer it to its opposite.
*
The Soviet Union and the United States had this in common—their systems could be perpetuated only if their citizenry were corrupt: the one having been reduced to universal fears, suspicion and disloyalty and the other to voracious, greedy hedonism.
*
Gracian advises that one should rather err by understatement than exaggeration and shows why overstatement undermines both the report and the reporter. But understatement is sometimes no less objectionable when it is a matter of giving a person his due. To judge fairly is to award honors fairly. To understate a triumph is an injustice.
*
Those who say everyone has a price have a price.
*
To point out the obvious might suggest the obvious is all you see.
*
To make a pass at. To hit on. To hook up with. A progress over just a few years from flirtation to effrontery to brutishness.
*
All odors spring from decay. Why these odors? But to signal others yet alive that the sacrifice has been made, the sacrifice that will be their nourishment and perpetuate their life.
*
I am largely self taught, and am as poor a student as I am a teacher.
*
On vanity: the importance of feeling superior can hardly be overestimated. We spend much of our daily life aiming for this feeling, be it mock-marveling at another’s stupidity, physical weakness, incompetence or moral shortcomings. Perhaps much of the motive energy behind revolutionary thinking is the feeling of superiority it can provide—a feeling of heightened goodness that lifts one not only above contemporaries but above the ancients, above the founding fathers of one’s country, and above one’s parents and siblings. Oh, the joy, the dizzying view from a peak at one’s tiny fellows.
*
Those who think they can be guided by history are likely to impose on the present situation the wrong lesson. History does not repeat itself.
*
The sciences, including the social sciences, converse in stereotypes—types, ideal types, categories and classes. Their aim is to control and to that purpose the fewer cogs they have to chart, the easier the task. This is the opposite of the artistic enterprise, where to stereotype is the greatest failure. Art wants a profusion of instances, the unusual, the unique, the extraordinary, the superlative. In this fundamental way, art is truer to life than science.
*
One doesn’t know he is authentic (really oneself) unless he is thoroughly false. What one is “naturally,” as it were automatically, is what one is as a product of multivarious forces acting upon a largely unreflective organism. One speaks, dresses, walks, gestures, mostly thinks along the same lines as one’s neighbors. One’s attitudes, tastes and wants are virtually indistinguishable from the host that surrounds one. Where does one see authenticity in that?
*
There are some who shrink from deciphering themselves truly because they do not want to think they are capable of seeing so starkly or of holding such opinions as would be entailed by clear sight, much less capable of forming them or of being so prickly and misanthropic—so un-nice, so un-American. With a wall of sentiment they hide themselves from what their own eyes could see. This is the attitude of kitsch.
*
Maternalism—the rule of motherliness; coercion through sugary agreeableness; co-option as the only option; manly competition as a social offense, as sin against the good group.
*
Sometimes one doesn’t rise to the courage of one’s convictions as much as sink to the refuge that they provide.
*
What a political partisan or ideologue brings to the debate is not a perspective on the truth or a partial truth, which when added to the view of sundry other partisans constitutes a whole truth, but rather he brings his particular distortion of the truth, truth as it has been molded, misshaped and mauled by interests that foreclose a grasping of the reality of things.
*
Even highly skeptical people can accept the greatest hogwash if it flatters them.
*
He could not forgive his father for marrying a lowly woman, nor his mother for marrying a lowly man, both marrying below the son’s own station.
*
The idea of heaven is more obnoxious than that of hell. That people merit a thrashing needs no argument. That some think their conduct deserves eternal bliss is laughable.
*
For some, all memories flay. Those of unfortunate acts and events pain with guilt and remorse and humiliation; those of happy times pain with the grief of loss.
*
Women teach etiquette. It is preparation for society with anyone. It opens the world to new experience. Men teach morality. It disciplines and circumscribes.
*
Young women don’t love, they obey. And they look for a man before whom their natural response, which is to serve and sit at his feet, can be given play. Later, when time and familiarity rob this usually mediocre man of his mystery and power, she grows to resent him for having been for her something he is not, and she regrets her obedience to him—and she will disobey him now.
*
To the extent people are dishonest with others—dissembling, hiding their true thoughts, motives and intentions—to that extent, minimally, they do not have a shared world. And the remaining, circumscribed world they do share is a socially constructed world, which is to some degree an agreed upon world and to some remaining degree a world imposed on the weaker by the stronger. The agreed upon world is the world as a result of compromise, a world that must be assented to, which means a world made suitable to the nature and dispositions of most men. Our private world is not shared. Our shared world is false.
*
Few have likely worn masks as transparent as his, or as numerous. Meant to hide his true nature and traits, these masks were so obvious in their intent and falsity that they rather revealed precisely what they were meant to hide. Like a moustache drawn on the upper lip with a black pen or an ill-fitting wig, they drew attention to what was lacking.
*
On the great yea sayers of life—Christians with their good news and end times, the progressives with their dreams of utopia, the communists and the worker’s paradise, the Jews and their covenant with god and the second messiah. But the world they affirm is a distorting lens that transfigures with a tissue of lies and delusions, ideologies and veils. Let them look without theses lenses, not from the aspect of eternal life or as if they were part of a providential plan or as if they were helpmates for Progress or in securing the holy seed if Israel. What then? Will they then affirm life? One can affirm these visions, as they are manmade for the purpose of claiming man’s assent, for justifying what men feel must be justified in order to endure. But to affirm the chaos? The formless?
*
Kymberli—Thus she spelled her name—or her mother did. This wholly safe, unobtrusive insistence on her individuality—this synonymy that proclaimed I am me and different from you, but does so inaudibly, more than half hidden, popping up almost unnoticeably on a school attendance sheet, much like the clitoris, which swells up unseen, silent, shying from masculine-like displays, boastings and ejaculations, but nonetheless craving attention.
*
Judge not lest you be judged—a good piece of advice for those who have much to be ashamed of.
*
Women who assert their intelligence by means of argument and displays of reason are generally avoided as mates for the same reasons men prefer physically weaker (and smaller) women. Ask any man: Would you prefer a wife who far exceeded you in physical strength. A cripple might answer Yes. But why would the remainder answer No?
*
Flaubert would seem to have it just right in saying that the three ingredients to happiness are stupidity, selfishness and good health (all being lost in the absence of stupidity). That being so, however, by what reasoning could a would-be improver of mankind be any more justified in undoing his fellows’ selfishness and stupidity than he would be in undoing their health—if, that is, his concern is with the other fellow’s happiness, which such improvers usually pretend. Of course, he’s not. The improver’s concern is with his own happiness or wellbeing, which he believes, correctly, would be increased if his fellows were less selfish, the amelioration of stupidity imagined to be one route to that end.
*
What is obesity but the most physical instance of formlessness, and is it surprising that the nation founded on rebellion and a general “freedom-from” and the democratic (that is to say, ochlocratic) impulse should number the most obese inhabitants?
*
Dogs, cats, horses—who cannot get along well with these, spend a lifetime together without animosity or the occasion for it? But who can so abide a man? For long? He is thorny, prickly, moody man. Man, the difficult animal.
*
He had the confidence that comes with the complete command of a wee bit of knowledge.
*
We are entering this new Dark Age consciously, intentionally. We are choosing it, not entering it as a consequence of fatigue or spiritual exhaustion, as the Romans were said to have done. We, rather, see it as a better world.
*
To photograph is, in however small a way, to honor, pay homage, elevate. And to photograph oneself is little different. It is to honor oneself. It is to say that this person warrants attention, perhaps respect. And it is this—this self-honoring—that offends. It of course reduces Hegel’s dyadic master/slave relation to a monadic non-relation. The “other” is eliminated from the picture. The audience and judges are de trop. There is no need of them—no need of you. I elevate myself with no other warrant than that which I presume to arrogate. The self-photographer is little less than he who lines his mantle with trophies he has awarded himself—this one for bravery, this one for intelligence, etc.
*
One seeking sexual pleasure coincidentally pleases another at the same time. Two seeking to please themselves in intellectual exchange or in simple companionship provide for each other’s desires while seeking to satisfy only their own. These are not examples of private vices leading to or entailing public benefits, but natural and sometimes cultivated drives finding satisfaction in another. To love someone is a desire to possess, a greed, thus mutual greed serving the interests of two simultaneously, to the benefit of each, though benefiting the other is not the intention of either, except insofar as giving pleasure may further bind the one lusted to oneself. This want, this greed, is recognized by all parties as greed and is welcomed by all parties—I want to be desired and perhaps even have this desire become a need—as it is seen as the strongest of warrants that bind, much stronger than care or regard or platonic love, not to mention love of mankind.
*
To the extent that love is a sickness, marriage is the cure. To fall in love and be rejected is to lose the ailment’s antidote.
*
People can do without only so much reality.
*
The shopping for gender is one of the last attacks on the limiting effects of nature, and a desperate last-ditch grasping for an identity when other founts of identity have been stripped away.
*
Getting drunk a great pleasure. Being drunk a disgrace.
*
When Jesus said, “Give all to the poor and come along with me, barefoot, and I will show you the road to heaven,” did he mean to suggest that the poor are to be raised from poverty and it was the duty of the rich to bring that about? Not likely. Poverty, rather, is a state to which one should elevate oneself, for it is there, free from the shackles of property and its attendant responsibilities, that one can be raised.
*
An agnostic is quite possibly one who believes in god—as an agnostic, as his name suggests, professes not knowing, but says nothing of believing or not. But no believer does know, he believes.