Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Richard Farina

But in such a place you choose to live? From five years old, except for summers, you've been in institutions. This is life? Here, in the microcosm, with what you know, you are a waste. Lost, but truly lost.

There is a lot of shit that gets written. It is this realization that has kept me from writing anything about the quotes I've been putting up. I don't want to contribute. Much of the shit that gets written originates in laziness; I hope this where mine comes from. But I have also read shit that seemed to be the product of hard work. It was still shit in case this is unclear. Not to join the bandwagon of haters on the present era, but it also seems that more shit gets written now than ever before. Easy answer is that there are fewer hurdles between you and publishing. Whatever the case, there is a lot of shit written.

This is not to say that Farina wrote shit. Well, he probably did, but this is not to say that this particular piece of writing by Farina is shit.

But despite all the shit being written, mine included, it's better that it get written than nothing be said at all. There are dead bodies floating in the water with which people brush their teeth. There are people who live in their cars and get tickets for having nowhere to go. There are people who are out of their minds and no one will help them in order to preserve their rights. There are people saying the same evil about their evil enemies that their evil enemies are saying about them. Going back to Vollmann and his question (How can we not know what goes on in this world?) I would rather write shit about the shit that goes on, than be too afraid to write anything at all.

On Beauty and Being Just

Elaine Scarry

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato's dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation.

Before leaving the site of persons, we must recall that we were here looking at only one complaint, the complaint that we might, by looking at such persons, bring them harm. But there are, of course, other arguments less political but equally antagonistic to the site of persons, such as the notion that beautiful persons do not deserve to be attended to for their beauty. Sometimes this idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that their beauty is natural: such persons were born with it, lazily inheriting it through no labor or merit of their own. (This argument is not very strong since so many things we unembarrassedly admire--great math skill, a capacity for musical composition, the physical agility of a dancer or speed of an athlete--entail luck at birth.) With equal energy the idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that such beauty is artifactual: such persons spend hours running along the beach, plaiting their hair into tiny braids, adorning themselves with beads, bracelets, oil, arrays of color. (This argument is also not very strong since we normally admire feats of artifactual labor, the formation of good government, a well-run newspaper, a twelve-year labor of self-education.) The two complaints contradict one another--one proposing that it is not the natural but the artifactual that should be honored, and the other proposing that it is not the artifactual but the natural that should be honored. More important, they together contradict the complaint we were considering: they say beautiful persons do not deserve to be looked at, whereas the complaint we were wrestling with says beautiful persons deserve not to be looked at (for their own safety). Although, therefore, we have limited ourselves to political arguments, we find--when we step off the straight and narrow path of our present inquiry--an incoherence equal to the one that lies straight ahead. 

Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care: if we do not search it out, it comes and finds us.

It is as though one has ceased to be the hero or the heroine in one's own story and has become what in a folktale is called the 'lateral figure' or 'donor figure'. It may sound not as though one's participation in a state of overall equality has been brought about, but as though one has just suffered a demotion. But at moments when we believe we are conducting ourselves with equality, we are usually instead conducting ourselves as the central figure in our own private story; and when we feel ourselves to be merely adjacent, or lateral (or even subordinate), we are probably more closely approaching a state of equality.

Radical decentering might also be called an opiated adjacency. A beautiful thing is not the only thing in the world that can make us feel adjacent; nor is it the only thing in the world that brings a state of acute pleasure. But it appears to be one of the few phenomena in the world that brings about both simultaneously: it permits us to be adjacent while also permitting us to experience extreme pleasure, thereby creating the sense that it is our own adjacency that is pleasure-bearing. This seems a gift in its own right, and a gift as a prelude to or precondition of enjoying fair relations with others. It is clear that an ehtical fairness which requires 'a symmetry of everyone's relation' will be greatly assisted by an aesthetic fairness that creates in all participants a state of delight in their own lateralness.

True Grit

Charles Portis

That is bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.

If the River Was Whiskey

T C Boyle

Let's face it, Ellis said, it's a society of haves and have-nots, and like it or not, we're the haves.

The Trojan Women

Euripides
Tr. Richard Lattimore

Achaeans! All your strength is in your spears, not in
the mind. What were you afraid of, that it made you kill
this child so savagely? That Troy, which fell, might be
raised from the ground once more? Your strength meant nothing, then.
When Hector's spear was fortunate, and numberless
strong hands were there to help him, we were still destroyed.
Now when the city is fallen and the Phrygians slain,
this baby terrified you? I despise the fear
which is pure terror in a mind unreasoning.

The Boilerplate Rhino

David Quammen

The yellowfin tuna is not celebrated for its intelligence. It's celebrated for its flavor. The spotted dolphin, on the other hand, is famously brainy and no one will tell us how it tastes. The killing of dolphins is a national outrage; the killing of tuna is a given. I keep asking myself why. There are some good reasons and some bad reasons, I think, which haven't been closely examined, or even sorted apart.

The Ethics of Memory

Avishai Margalit

Caring is a demanding attitude toward others. Some of us are by inclination good-hearted people, who may have a diffused benign attitude toward our fellow human beings in general. But this diffused good will does not amount to that unselfish heed to the particular needs and interests of others that caring requires. The snag is not that it is hard to like people we don't know: caring does not necessarily require liking. What we find hard is the attention that is implied by caring. Women may be better at dividing their attention than men, and thus more able to c are for others than men, as Carol Gilligan used to argue. But even Mother Theresa lacked the resources to pay attention to everyone. Along with Dostoyevsky, we are suspicious of those who care for humanity in general but who do not care for any human being in particular. We should be even more suspicious of those who pay attention only to what they feel toward others but are incapable of paying attention to others; in short, we should be suspicious of sentimentalists.

Are we wrong to judge our life by the way we remember it rather than by the way we experience it? The so-called scientific picture says yes; the literary picture says no. And I say (timidly perhaps) that the truth is in a combination of the two--a picture, that is, that can combine our experienced life, which is colored by moods, with our remembered life, which contains emotions. There is, however, one other picture that I would like to mention, which challenges the assumption taken for granted both by the scientific and the literary images. The common assumption is that life should be measured by addition, not by subtraction, and that the difference between the two pictures is in what it is that should be added. The scientific picture contends that the addition should encompass all the experiences in one's life, remembered as well as unremembered. The literary picture, in contrast, contends that the addition should comprise all the highlights that are remembered and that go into a coherent story of one's life.

The hope with which I credit moral witnesses is a rather sober hope: that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony. What is so heroic in this hope is the fact that people who are subjected to evil regimes intent on destroying the fabric of their moral community easily come to see the regime as invincible and indestructible and stop believing in the very possibility of a moral community. Being a helpless inmate in a Nazi concentration camp or a Bolshevik gulag can make you believe that the thousand years Reich or the unstoppable juggernaut of the communist triumph is just the way of the world. The disparity of power between victim and perpetrator confirms every minute what seems to be the invincibility of the regime. Under such adverse conditions, to believe in what would under normal circumstances be a rather reasonable belief--namely, that the evil power is limited and temporary--is hard indeed. The belief, under such conditions, in the possibility of a moral community calls for a veritable leap of faith. But then the moral witness does not have to have the assured confidence of a sleepwalker that is manifested by a religious witness.

In the 'enlightened' picture, truth is given in principle to all; truth is on the surface. Even expert scientific knowledge is not esoteric knowledge but is in principle knowledge open to all. In the final analysis, the authority of the 'new knowledge' hinges only on observations. In this new picture, the reliability of hearsay testimony is tested by sampling the witness's statements against our observations.

The comparison between the God who remembers man and the mother who remembers the child of her womb is interesting. In Hebrew the words rehem (womb) and rahamim (mercy) stem from the same root. Mercy is returning those who are far away to their source, the womb. Hence, the act of remembering is an act of mercy and grace.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

David Markson

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.
Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Somebody is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York.
Nobody, came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.
To tell the truth, perhaps I left only three or four messages altogether.
I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I were forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.
Possibly it was several years longer ago than that, however.
And of course I was quite out of my mind for a certain period too, back then.

The Comforters

Muriel Spark

Caroline thought, 'Well, he will ring in the morning.' She lay on her divan staring out at the night sky beyond her balcony, too tired to draw the curtains. she was warmed by the knowledge that Laurence was near to hand, wanting to speak to her. She could rely on him to take her side, should there be any difficulty with Helena over her rapid departure from St Philumena's. On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.

Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena. 

Finding a Form

William H Gass

Narratives like the story of Gyges and his ring imperceptibly seduce their listeners, because they always solicit our participation: not for a naive or complacent identification with the protagonists necessarily (where each of us is Gyges, Eve or Adam, maybe God), or even with the rich raciness of their roles (where each of us takes the queen's place in bed, or the serpent's in the tree), but by an implication that extends to the idea of man in general; so even if I say to myself: "I wouldn't go down in that gorge--no way--or sneak that ring from that dead man's finger--not me--and I'm too good a guy, basically, to be bought by a little loose change, free flesh or a position of power," nevertheless (and this is Glaucon's expectation), I can believe everybody else would; so when Glaucon suggests we place one such ring on the finger of a plainly unjust man, who has already flouted society's conventions without its aid, and then another on the finger of a man who has always behaved like a good worker bee, a diligent drone, my mind moves easily along the track which has been greased for it to the right rhetorical conclusion: beneath clothes, cosmetics, and conventions, where we confront the naked soul, there is no difference to be discerned between the sinner and the saint, both souls are so stained and opaque, except that the saint, in addition to his other vices, is a successful hypocrite.

The Last Unicorn

Peter Beagle

My lady, he said, I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story. 

Libra

Don DeLillo

Kennedy should have blown it up when he had the chance, Ferrie said.
You blow up Cuba, you get the Russians.
I've got my rubber bedsheets all ready. An eternity of canned food. I like the idea of living in shelters. You go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The sewer system is a form of welfare state. It's a government  funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being independent, digging latrines int eh woods, in a million backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit.