Future contingencies? Utility? I would give the exact same lesson if I knew that every single member of my class were scheduled to be shot in the morning.
***
He declares his opinions first, inserts them constantly into casual conversation—so that the one who prefers to maintain a reserve, to hold his cards close, is forced to be the latecomer, the imitator.
***
Why are my parents trying to live over again my life? Do I live my life so that they can live it again? Why does this pollute my life so? Why are my parents sending me photographs of them doing the things that I have already done? Aspirant vampires.
***
Recent mystified accounts of AI would seem to confirm Nietzsche’s view that we believe in God so long as we believe in grammar.
***
The hardest thing in writing: to hold on to a mood, to give finality to what is partial without insisting on giving it finality in thought. An analogous problem is that of living in different keys, the impossibility of reconciling the key in which one writes with that in which one lives. Some of us are tempted to the belief that this division—of living and imagining, what we possess and what we desire—is a peculiarly “modern” condition. In fact, what is “modern” is mainly the belief that this division marks a declension from a prior state of satiety. “Modernity” is the perception of the contingency of our alienation and division. To cease to be modern would be to perceive division as permanent.
***
Even when wrong, Madam X has a noble independence of mind. Even when right, Mr. Y has the soul of a quivering lackey.
***
But seriously—might we not say, of autofiction (of which we might think no further theory were required... apart from the true one) that it is a roman à clef in which the names just happen to correspond, with Menardian exactitude and improvement, to their originals?
***
He reminded me of my brother-in-law in that he had naïve ideas which he then equally naively rejected, the old and the new ideas held together in an unstable mixture owing to his continued membership in the now-despised organization.
***
What is writing? The inevitable image, for me, comes from the supernatural serial killer film The Cell (2000), in which a man is tortured by having his viscera extracted with a winch. I remain, a Romantic, you see…
***
Thought needs a lattice. The lattice is what permits the organic, thought, to become free-form.
***
“Feel good” propaganda art as pornography: worse than pornography, in that it makes those who use it proud of themselves.
***
Her tepid reservations were a prelude to craven acquiescence.
***
“Collaborative Intelligence”
Down with collaborators! Fifth columnists to the wall! And as for the fraternizers, those who merely made nice with these criminals against humanity: their heads shall be shaved, the legend PUTAIN shall be hung on placards about their necks, they shall be marched through the town square to the jeers of their fellow townspeople: of all those who, at the most savage price, preserved their freedom, never knowing when, if ever, the tide would flow back out. Their children shall be outcast, forced to change their names so as not to bear the taint of their parents’ betrayal; they shall live out their lives in expiation of crimes committed before they were born. The rich among them shall endow charitable foundations dedicated to undoing their parents’ faults—to no avail. Never until their names are ground into dust will their shame be expunged.
***
We who weren’t there—who did not face the threat of death, of torture, of reprisals against our families—should not look too glibly upon the “attentistes” among the French; a recognition that adds yet a deeper shade of vulgarity to the fantasies of “resistance” that ran riot in our country, lo those not so many years ago. To have been an active collaborator was supererogatory. To have been a passive collaborator was—as Sartre and many others attested—was all but inevitable, was “normal.” The French fantasy of universal resistance stems from shame at having displayed merely an ordinary degree of courage.