i am guilty
Elie Wiesel (via NYT):
The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
zero the console
One customer said when he wears a bra he feels he can ‘reset’ his feelings. If something bad happens he puts on a bra and feels he can come back and fight another day.
serve
when people tell me they want to make a difference, i laugh.
but it’s impossible to laugh when someone says i want to serve.
you almost never hear that though.
a hairy hand
His (Horror writer Koji Suzuki’s) latest work is set in a public toilet and plays on Japanese superstitions that ghosts and evil spirits inhabit the smallest room in the house, which is why they were traditionally relegated to the most distant part of the home. Parents still tell naughty children that a hairy hand will seize them when they have their pants around their ankles if they misbehave and drag them down into the dark water below.
smooth criminals
Byron: womaniser. Coleridge: drug fiend. Pound: fascist sympathiser. Yeats: snob. Crane: alcoholic. Keats: smackhead. Kipling: imperialist. Hughes: another womaniser. Poe: married a 13 year-old. Verlaine: jailed for shooting one of his friends. Lawrence: pervert. Betjeman: had a bit of a temper on him, apparently. And don’t let’s get started on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The booze, the sexually transmitted diseases, the mistresses, the page boys…
advice for everyone
Harold Evans’s advice to journalists was that when listening to a politician you should always have in mind: why is this bastard lying to me?
essential
Robert Crunden describes Albert Jay Nock:
Nock made the essential point: ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permitted, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself.
Edgar Allan Poe
I was never really insane, except on occasions where my heart was touched.
Jia Zhangke
My expression, my view on history, my view on the truth must be independent but I tell myself not to get marginalized, because being marginalized means you can’t do anything. Marginalization can be a kind of pleasant stance–I really admire many of those people–but I would rather expend enormous energy trying to dance with the many levels of the era in which we live.
Nikos Kazantzakis’ on his first visit to Singapore
Imagine slender, tall Chinese women like snakes erected upright. Never did the human body look so like a sword. And through the dresses slit open at the sides, at each step, the yellow blade of the leg glistens—slender, strong, irresistible—right up to the pelvis.
Mario Benedetti (1920-2009)
When they bury me / please don’t forget / about my pen.
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (Part 3)
211 – One tear from a woman could drown him.
213 – Have you noticed, boss, everything good in this world is an invention of the devil? Pretty women, spring, roast suckling, wine—the devil made them all! God made monks, fasting, camomile-tea and ugly women…pooh!
217 – All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time don’t live them!
226 – Whether a man’s good or bad, I’m sorry for him, for all of ‘em. The sight of a man just rends my insides, even if I act as though I don’t care a damm! There he is, poor devil, I think; he also eats and drinks and makes love and is frightened, whoever he is: he has his God and his devil just the same, and he’ll peg out and lie as stiff as a board beneath the ground and be food for worms, just the same. Poor devil! We’re all brothers! All worm meat!
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (Part 2)
104 – For in his mind our profits underwent marvellous transformations: they became travels, women and new adventures.
106 – I don’t want her to sleep alone. It wouldn’t be right, boss…
112 – Who then created this labyrinth of hesitation, this temple of presumption, this pitcher of sin, this field sown with a thousand deceptions, this gateway to Hell, this basket overflowing with artfulness, this poison which tastes like honey, this bond which chains mortals to the earth: woman?
114 – You’re young and pretty tough, eating well, drinking well, breathing exhilarating sea air, and storing up energy—but what are you doing with it all? You sleep alone, and it’s just too bad for the energy.
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (Part 1)
103 pages into Zorba the Greek, i feel that this was written for me, especially pg. 101.
3 – This world’s a life sentence.
4 – …solitude—the natural climate for man.
6 – I replied again, trying not to compromise myself by embarking on a long sentence.
8 – How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!
22 – To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow’s got to be calm, and old and toothless…
24 – …this world is a mystery and man is just a great brute.
sowing into the machine of grace
Our God bears no resemblance to a vending machine.
perhaps
Perhaps in this, I thought, lies the key to the good life—not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.
George Vaillant
Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.
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