lurker. post scavenger. semi-active.
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“Listen. I don’t know how or when My grieving will end, but I’m always Relearning how to be human again.”— Sherman Alexie, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir”
“this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.”— Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
“I realize that having grown up in the United States, most of the images of Vietnam and Vietnamese people had to do with the American War. And those images were always, in a sense, a setup. You get involved with the Vietnamese person in a movie and they always die. You get involved with, you know, a timeline photo essay of a Vietnamese person and they always die. That was the story, they always die. If you watch Platoon, if you watch Rambo, if you watch Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now, the story is not really about Vietnamese people or places. It’s about the U.S. soldiers who have basically been dropped there to fight the war. And the Vietnamese people are kind of a backdrop to the drama of the U.S. soldiers. They are inseparable from the rice paddies, they are inseparable from the mountains, they are inseparable from the water buffaloes. They die. That was the setup. They never lived. They never lived. They never lived. They were never characters who are individuals. You never saw them lived. There were never pleasure, there were never ecstasy, there were never sorrow. Really, they were just there in a sense to be the backdrop, inseparable from the jungle, inseparable from the tigers in the jungle, inseparable from the heat, inseparable from the humidity. They never lived.”
“[T]he reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend–substantively and in-depth.”— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts—it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure—and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music. It is the physical “I” that feels an unbearable pain— and then a dull fretfulness—when the whole world of melody suddenly glistens and comes cascading down in the second part of the first movement—it is flesh and bone that dies a little each time I am sucked into the yearning of the second movement.”— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947—1963
“When we are asked to swear in courts of law that we will tell ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’, we are being asked the impossible. It is simply beyond our powers. Our memories are fallible; even scientific truth is merely an approximation; and we are ignorant about nearly all of the Universe. Nevertheless, a life may depend on our testimony. To swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the limit of our abilities is a fair request. Without the qualifying phrase, though, it’s simply out of touch. But such a qualification, however consonant with human reality, is unacceptable to any legal system. If everyone tells the truth only to a degree determined by individual judgement, then incriminating or awkward facts might be withheld, events shaded, culpability hidden, responsibility evaded, and justice denied. So the law strives for an impossible standard of accuracy, and we do the best we can.”— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“You wanted hell? Here it is revealing itself, so look closely…”— Czeslaw Milosz, from New and Collected Poems (1931-2001); “More than Efficient,”
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you… It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions – predigested books and ideas… Marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short… And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”… The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”— Adrienne Rich
“… And what is it to be young in years and suddenly wakened to the anguish, the urgency of life?”— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947—1963
“My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.”— Francis Bacon