May 2013
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March 2013
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February 2013
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The Country Wife (Dana Gioia)
She makes her way through the dark trees down to the lake to be alone following their voices on the breeze she makes her way. Through the dark trees the distant stars are all she sees. They cannot light the way she’s gone. She makes her way through the dark trees down to the lake to be alone.
The night reflected on the lake the fire of stars changed into water. She cannot see the winds that...
January 2013
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December 2012
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All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils…
—The Malleus Maleficarum (1484)
November 2012
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On account of the fact, he said gentlemanly, that I have at all times purposely refrained from an exhaustive exercise of my faculty of vision and my power of optical inspection (I refer now to things perfectly palpable and discernible—the coming of dawn across the mountains is one example and the curious conduct of owls and bats in strong moonlight is another), I had expected (foolishly,...
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The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream… Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you should not lose your...
October 2012
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Errol Morris, on the "wilderness of error"
There’s a Supreme Court case about involuntary commitment, O’Connor v. Donaldson, and the man at the center of it, Kenneth Donaldson, wrote a book about being involuntarily committed for 20 years. He keeps going back to this expression: “Give a dog a bad name and you might as well kill it.” I always took that to mean that once you label something in a certain way, an infernal logic...
September 2012
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“At the end we have no firm ground under us, no principle to hold on to, but a suspension of thought in infinite space—”
—Karl Jaspers
August 2012
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There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important.
Once one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most: the sacrifices of the first-born in all prehistoric religions belong here…
Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts,...
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Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous… But people like to forget—even sober spirits—that making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments. Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
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on pets
In the past, families of all classes kept domestic animals because they served a useful purpose — guard dogs, hunting dogs, mice-killing cats, and so on. The practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping, exactly, of pets… is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique. It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the...
September 2011
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“The English verb “‘to look at” does not convey this meaning, but the...”
– Carl Gustav Jung. Vol. 6, Lecture I, May 4, 1932, p. 3. (via whaleextract)
August 2011
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“Man lives on earth, doesn’t he? Well, in the dark, the earth disappears.”
— Witold Gombrowicz, Pornografia
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reading Cynthia Ozick makes me not want to die,...
… to postulate an afterlife was her single irony—a game in the head not unlike a melting fudge cube held against the upper palate. There, at any rate, Puttermesser would sit, in Eden, under a middle-sized tree, in the solid blaze of an infinite heart-of-summer July, green, green, green everywhere, green above and green below, herself gleaming and made glorious by sweat, every inch annihilated,...
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To be visible all the time—to live in a swarm of eyes— surely that leaves its mark on the face.
— Tomas Tranströmer, “Solitude”
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To argue that a psychological feature is a social construct implies precisely that there is some natural, non-socially constructed reality behind it, something more real. It is clear, however, that what is socially constructed is real, like an atom bomb or a hole in the ozone layer. To deny this is to underestimate the power of social and symbolic forces, which is mere fancy.
— Darian...
July 2011
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impossible to read this without thinking about...
Jews “evacuate the law of jouissance,” they are “the people of the Book” who stick to the rules and allow for no ecstatic experience of the Sacred; yet, at the same time, they do find an excessive enjoyment precisely in their dealings with the Text of the Book: The “Talmudic” enjoyment of how to read it properly, how to interpret it so we can none the less have...
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Misery does not automatically generate discontent, nor is the intensity of discontent directly proportionate to the degree of misery.
Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. De Tocqueville in his researches into the state of society in France...
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The lure of a permanent childhood in America partly comes from the overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t yet achieved one’s true youth, because true youth would be defined by freedom so total that no one can attain it
Without a powerful aspiration to become adult, without some separate value that downplays childhood for sharper freedoms in age and maturity, the feeling of...
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from Two Songs (Adrienne Rich)
All day he appears to me touchingly desirable, a prize one could wreck one’s peace for. I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel a sweet flower and what pure happiness to know all our high-toned questions breed in a lively animal
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The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate that unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is...
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Edward Bernays on propaganda
To admit that it exists, but expect that it shall not be used, is unreasonable.
— Propaganda, 1928
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