"God help us — for art is long, and life so short." —Faust
““Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
““The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows of the Open Plan. Its network of sofas, soft rectangles, low tables, plant pots, photograph books, had taken me a long time to master, yet now it had been so transformed it might have been a new room. There were young people everywhere and their bags, jackets, oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces. What was more, the room's space had become divided into twenty-four boxes––arranged in two tiers––all the way to the rear wall. Because of this partitioning, it was hard to gain an overall view of what was before me, but I gradually made sense of things. Josie was near the middle of the room talking with three guest girls. Their heads were almost touching, and because of how they were standing, the upper parts of their faces, including all their eyes, had been placed in a box on the higher tier, while all their mouths and chins had been squeezed into a lower box. The majority of children were on their feet, some moving between boxes. Over at the rear wall, three boys were seated on the modular sofa, and even though they were sitting apart, their heads had been placed together inside a single box, while the outstretched leg of the boy nearest the window extended not only across the neighboring box, but right into the one beyond. There was an unpleasant tint on the three boxes containing the boys on the sofa––a sickly yellow––and an anxiety passed through my mind. Then other people moved across my view of them, and I began to attend instead to the voices around me.”
“The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows of the Open Plan. Its network of sofas, soft rectangles, low tables, plant pots, photograph books, had taken me a long time to master, yet now it had been so transformed it might have been a new room. There were young people everywhere and their bags, jackets, oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces. What was more, the room's space had become divided into twenty-four boxes––arranged in two tiers––all the way to the rear wall. Because of this partitioning, it was hard to gain an overall view of what was before me, but I gradually made sense of things. Josie was near the middle of the room talking with three guest girls. Their heads were almost touching, and because of how they were standing, the upper parts of their faces, including all their eyes, had been placed in a box on the higher tier, while all their mouths and chins had been squeezed into a lower box. The majority of children were on their feet, some moving between boxes. Over at the rear wall, three boys were seated on the modular sofa, and even though they were sitting apart, their heads had been placed together inside a single box, while the outstretched leg of the boy nearest the window extended not only across the neighboring box, but right into the one beyond. There was an unpleasant tint on the three boxes containing the boys on the sofa––a sickly yellow––and an anxiety passed through my mind. Then other people moved across my view of them, and I began to attend instead to the voices around me.”
““Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?”
“Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?”
““Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.”
“Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.”
““The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disembowelled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you're in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs' contempt for other people's bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.”
“The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disembowelled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you're in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs' contempt for other people's bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.”
““In psychoanalysis, obsessional thinking is structured as a myth: the obsession takes the prior conflicts of another, and transposes and reorders them, and places them into a mythic structure. It is a psychic repetition of events, most often in his family’s history; an unconscious intergenerational transmission. It uses the obsession to transpose unresolved elements in the father’s history and resolve them in himself. For example, “marrying your mother” is more often not an Oedipal fantasy about a child’s desire, but an obsessional attempt at reworking the father’s history. It is unconscious; he does not know that marrying her is such an attempt, nor why he feels familiarly unsatisfied in the marriage. The fantasy of Odysseus returning, then besting the suitors; first at a technical skill and then in individual combat; collecting all of their weapons––it is an acting out of a play, the obsessive’s individual myth. The trouble is that it is impossible to bring these two stories––history and myth––together; it cannot entirely succeed, one can’t settle the dead father’s old debts by re-enacting them with a new cast. He will inevitably fail at closing the loop; but by trying to make one coincide with the other, he makes a perennially unsatisfying turning maneuver, and therefore continues to try. But when this "play" is enacted in an actual play, i.e. not in real life but in an actual story, myth, the loop can be closed by some *author*, some other omnipotent entity; to be clear, it literally requires *deus ex machina*, for example by a god convincing the suitors' extended families not to descend on the house and retaliate. But this requirement is not a part of the failing of the literary myth as a story; it is the fulfillment of an unconscious wish in an obsessive's individual myth: the myth *causes to exist* some other omnipotent entity.”
“In psychoanalysis, obsessional thinking is structured as a myth: the obsession takes the prior conflicts of another, and transposes and reorders them, and places them into a mythic structure. It is a psychic repetition of events, most often in his family’s history; an unconscious intergenerational transmission. It uses the obsession to transpose unresolved elements in the father’s history and resolve them in himself. For example, “marrying your mother” is more often not an Oedipal fantasy about a child’s desire, but an obsessional attempt at reworking the father’s history. It is unconscious; he does not know that marrying her is such an attempt, nor why he feels familiarly unsatisfied in the marriage. The fantasy of Odysseus returning, then besting the suitors; first at a technical skill and then in individual combat; collecting all of their weapons––it is an acting out of a play, the obsessive’s individual myth. The trouble is that it is impossible to bring these two stories––history and myth––together; it cannot entirely succeed, one can’t settle the dead father’s old debts by re-enacting them with a new cast. He will inevitably fail at closing the loop; but by trying to make one coincide with the other, he makes a perennially unsatisfying turning maneuver, and therefore continues to try. But when this "play" is enacted in an actual play, i.e. not in real life but in an actual story, myth, the loop can be closed by some *author*, some other omnipotent entity; to be clear, it literally requires *deus ex machina*, for example by a god convincing the suitors' extended families not to descend on the house and retaliate. But this requirement is not a part of the failing of the literary myth as a story; it is the fulfillment of an unconscious wish in an obsessive's individual myth: the myth *causes to exist* some other omnipotent entity.”
““We have done all we could for him - haven't we? But there is no disguising the fact, Mr Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously - that's my principal. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer. I don't deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory - mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events - but look how precarious the position is - and why? Because the method is unsound.' 'Do you' said I, looking at the shore, 'call it "unsound method"?' 'Without doubt,' he exclaimed, hotly. 'Don't you?' ... 'No method at all,' I murmured after a while.”
“We have done all we could for him - haven't we? But there is no disguising the fact, Mr Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously - that's my principal. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer. I don't deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory - mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events - but look how precarious the position is - and why? Because the method is unsound.' 'Do you' said I, looking at the shore, 'call it "unsound method"?' 'Without doubt,' he exclaimed, hotly. 'Don't you?' ... 'No method at all,' I murmured after a while.”
““The war that we are fighting today for the emancipation of the Chinese is a part of the war for the freedom of all human beings, and the independent, happy, and liberal China that we are fighting to establish will be a part of that new world order.”
“The war that we are fighting today for the emancipation of the Chinese is a part of the war for the freedom of all human beings, and the independent, happy, and liberal China that we are fighting to establish will be a part of that new world order.”
““[A] battalion of cripples forms the bulk of the inmates. Survivors of sport, of the highway, and of every possible and imaginable kind of domestic accident, these patients remain at Berck for as long as it takes to get their shattered limbs working again. I call them 'tourists.' And to complete the picture, a niche must be found for us, broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department. Of course, we spoil the view. I am all too conscious of the slight uneasiness we cause as, rigid and mute, we make our way through a group of more fortunate patients. The best place to observe this phenomenon is the rehabilitation room, where all patients undergoing physical therapy are congregated. Garish and noisy, a hubbub of splints, artificial limbs, and harnesses of varying complexity, it is an authentic Court of Miracles. Here we see a young man with an earring who suffered multiple fractures in a motorbike accident; a grandmother in a fluorescent nightgown learning to walk after a fall from a stepladder; and a vagrant whose foot was somehow amputated by a subway train. Lined up like a row of onions, this human throng waves arms and legs under minimal supervision, while I lie tethered to an inclined board that is slowly raised to a vertical position. Every morning I spend half an hour suspended this way, frozen to attention in a posture that must evoke the appearance of the Commendatore's statue in the second act of Mozart's *Don Giovanni*. Below, people laugh, joke, call out. I would like to be part of all this hilarity, but as soon as I direct my one eye toward them, the young man, the grandmother, and the homeless man turn away, feeling the sudden need to study the ceiling smoke detector. The 'tourists' must be very worried about fire.”
“[A] battalion of cripples forms the bulk of the inmates. Survivors of sport, of the highway, and of every possible and imaginable kind of domestic accident, these patients remain at Berck for as long as it takes to get their shattered limbs working again. I call them 'tourists.' And to complete the picture, a niche must be found for us, broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department. Of course, we spoil the view. I am all too conscious of the slight uneasiness we cause as, rigid and mute, we make our way through a group of more fortunate patients. The best place to observe this phenomenon is the rehabilitation room, where all patients undergoing physical therapy are congregated. Garish and noisy, a hubbub of splints, artificial limbs, and harnesses of varying complexity, it is an authentic Court of Miracles. Here we see a young man with an earring who suffered multiple fractures in a motorbike accident; a grandmother in a fluorescent nightgown learning to walk after a fall from a stepladder; and a vagrant whose foot was somehow amputated by a subway train. Lined up like a row of onions, this human throng waves arms and legs under minimal supervision, while I lie tethered to an inclined board that is slowly raised to a vertical position. Every morning I spend half an hour suspended this way, frozen to attention in a posture that must evoke the appearance of the Commendatore's statue in the second act of Mozart's *Don Giovanni*. Below, people laugh, joke, call out. I would like to be part of all this hilarity, but as soon as I direct my one eye toward them, the young man, the grandmother, and the homeless man turn away, feeling the sudden need to study the ceiling smoke detector. The 'tourists' must be very worried about fire.”
““Just like a bee, he gathered all the best inside himself, all things that are precious and useful, and placed them in his soul as if it were a beehive, keeping them safe.”
“Just like a bee, he gathered all the best inside himself, all things that are precious and useful, and placed them in his soul as if it were a beehive, keeping them safe.”
““His white-shirted stomach rippled with laughter. The rays of the sun that poured through the swaying branches of the trees made me feel happy. Like the young man's wrinkled shirt, my life was wrinkled. But, wrinkled as it was, how white his shirt shone in the sunlight! Perhaps I too?”
“His white-shirted stomach rippled with laughter. The rays of the sun that poured through the swaying branches of the trees made me feel happy. Like the young man's wrinkled shirt, my life was wrinkled. But, wrinkled as it was, how white his shirt shone in the sunlight! Perhaps I too?”
““"Damn, am I still thirsty." It didn't matter who spoke the sacred word. It was always as if a choir had spoken it. Thirst, after all, was just a synonym for life. It was perhaps a somewhat questionable synonym, but on the other hand the only one that made sense at this hour, and I found it a charming change of pace from what the needle circumscribed: the little death.”
“"Damn, am I still thirsty." It didn't matter who spoke the sacred word. It was always as if a choir had spoken it. Thirst, after all, was just a synonym for life. It was perhaps a somewhat questionable synonym, but on the other hand the only one that made sense at this hour, and I found it a charming change of pace from what the needle circumscribed: the little death.”
““So much time wasted not showing it, clamped up, this is repression, the repression of thinking that words are the only way out, they are not, the way out is with the body.”
“So much time wasted not showing it, clamped up, this is repression, the repression of thinking that words are the only way out, they are not, the way out is with the body.”
““So the royal corkscrew finds me twisted, does he?”
“So the royal corkscrew finds me twisted, does he?”
““Perhaps if the abstract or surrealist artist steals from that world’s images, from that other plane long enough, the creatures inherent to that world will take an interest in us and contrive to come here. Perhaps they’ll use us as a medium, transferring themselves through a kind of paintbrush insemination. I keep thinking of the words of the dadaist Jean Arp: Art is like fruit, growing out of man - like the child out of its mother . . .”
“Perhaps if the abstract or surrealist artist steals from that world’s images, from that other plane long enough, the creatures inherent to that world will take an interest in us and contrive to come here. Perhaps they’ll use us as a medium, transferring themselves through a kind of paintbrush insemination. I keep thinking of the words of the dadaist Jean Arp: Art is like fruit, growing out of man - like the child out of its mother . . .”
““Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
“Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
““Gentlemen—by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood—gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism.”
“Gentlemen—by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood—gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism.”
““Obesity is one of the chief symptoms of neurosis in the Western world. The millions of dollars spent on research, diets, and exercise spas attest to the futility of our efforts to cope with it. Thinness has become a mania tending to focus the neurosis on food, but the roots of the problem remain diseased. Many thousands of anorexic girls, starving and running themselves to collapse, are denying the traditional female role, preferring to regress into childhood. Many thousands of their fat sisters are in the equally agonizing throes of a slow process of destruction. Both are in a blood pact with Death.”
“Obesity is one of the chief symptoms of neurosis in the Western world. The millions of dollars spent on research, diets, and exercise spas attest to the futility of our efforts to cope with it. Thinness has become a mania tending to focus the neurosis on food, but the roots of the problem remain diseased. Many thousands of anorexic girls, starving and running themselves to collapse, are denying the traditional female role, preferring to regress into childhood. Many thousands of their fat sisters are in the equally agonizing throes of a slow process of destruction. Both are in a blood pact with Death.”
““Baldness: Accept your thinning hair by keeping it very short or shaved. Be grateful for the money you're saving on expensive hair products, be sure to wear sunscreen in warm weather, and never sport a comb-over.”
“Baldness: Accept your thinning hair by keeping it very short or shaved. Be grateful for the money you're saving on expensive hair products, be sure to wear sunscreen in warm weather, and never sport a comb-over.”
““Flaking: A tendency to flake (or flake out) is a very modern affliction, meaning the habit of cancelling plans, often at late notice, for no good reason. It's important to resist any natural tendency towards inactivity and reclusiveness. You might feel daunted by the prospect of a birthday gathering at which you know no one but the host, but you will almost certainly have a better time than you expect. The friendship points you garner will also pay dividends when it's your turn to sit nervously in the pub, hoping that someone will show up to help you drink that bottle of birthday prosecco.”
“Flaking: A tendency to flake (or flake out) is a very modern affliction, meaning the habit of cancelling plans, often at late notice, for no good reason. It's important to resist any natural tendency towards inactivity and reclusiveness. You might feel daunted by the prospect of a birthday gathering at which you know no one but the host, but you will almost certainly have a better time than you expect. The friendship points you garner will also pay dividends when it's your turn to sit nervously in the pub, hoping that someone will show up to help you drink that bottle of birthday prosecco.”
