Читать книгу The Boulevards of Extinction - Andrew Benson Brown - Страница 7

The world is a watercolor drop on a crude oil canvas.

When Folly speaks in her own person the fools only hear praise.

Courtly love was a war of attrition; modern love is a blitzkrieg.

Models of content: the blighted ovum, the gaping mouth, the car trunk, the freshly dug grave. From the womb to the tomb, we are so much more than absent-minded.

Thanatos: Our first recourse on a windless sea.

Happiness has been the subject of many sitcoms but no documentaries.

There is such a thing as a lucky thought. Many thinkers make their careers off of betting the same number on every spin of the roulette wheel.

If Jesus had turned bread into chocolate, Cana would be infamous for its flower girls—disciplettes of the Pimp of Peace.

For a parched cheek, raindrops offer catharsis on loan. Those unable to weep can at least soak themselves in heaven’s sorrow.

It’s hard to know God when his finger is on their button.

Scientism is the thoughtful twin of Chaos. To balance annihilation, the “theory of everything” is constructed as a way to explain nothing.

The choice between savagery and monotony largely depends on whether you focus on the shipwreck or the island paradise.

But there is a royal road to geometry—defenestration. A square, space, a solid plane: knowledge easily accessible.

The gift of technology will culminate with Prometheus escaping the raven and presenting moonshine to firefighter trainees.

Less theatrical than “greatness of soul” is the pants-passion of Epicureanism. The first drama is all character, the second all plot.

Pick a pocket or rob a convenience store: then you will know what it’s like to live as an artist.

One suspects that certain people rely on fresh breath to help them speak well, when in truth they just like drinking their mouthwash.

The closest proof that you experienced consciousness will be your novelization.

The free marketplace of ideas: that invisible head which everywhere and nowhere contradicts itself for the sake of inclusiveness so that no idea is left standing against the wall of the cocktail party. A world of nondiscrimination where no thought is a falsehood—the sole judge is fashion.

Derision of love is the cutter’s sense of release, the peace of mind obtained from ripping off one’s bandages and fingering the wound.

Every forbidden realm of logic has its preferred fallacy-turned-virtue. In politics it is the argumentum ad temperantiam, among married couples the ad nauseam, at funerals the ad ignorantiam, in the delivery room petitio principii.

Twinkling heavenly bodies go unmapped as stargazers point their telescopes towards the nebulas around the masterpiece.

A theory of practice is a bird’s eye experience that lacks ground perspective. It sees the lines of paved streets but overlooks the back alley shortcuts.

If you’re intent on speaking artfully, pay a scribe to follow you around and record your utterances; for no one else in the room will grasp the subtlety of your meaning. Don’t, however, pay a documentary filmmaker: those who watch your diary will attend only to the extraverbal superfluities, and dismiss what you say based on the shabbiness of your bearing.

Outside every desire a lawyer and a doctor conspire to gain admission.

An iconoclast lacerates idols with the shards from his own stained glass window.

Felatious inferences: the swallowing of every strict logical consequence. A logician is often caught wide-eyed when his premises explode all over his face.

Expediency rubs off on people the closer they chafe to the board chair; excellence does business near the throne, at the urinal.

The rebel artist stands proudly as the centerpiece of the businessperson’s hors d’oeuvres platter.

If Heraclitus were alive today he would recommend waterboarding his native Ephesians for the secrets of their ignorance—to protect them from the logos.

Discarding the ladder once you climb it won’t rid you of your past, unless you’re standing on the top rung when it falls.

A man with no name is free to identify himself with any symbol. When the tide is right he will salute even swimming flags and rescue aliases from shark victims.

Much of what constitutes admiration is the wish that the admirer’s mistakes, too, will be fortuitous.

Consumerism is the millenialization of venerable legalities. First the Magna Carta, then the Magna Mart—a cartful of tupperware crowns and produce sceptors available on discount.

All the handbooks for princes could not prevent a merchant from opening one. Since then, the genre of leadership advice has been aimed at everyone but leaders—there are many handbooks for losers, none for presidents.

The three estates: those who prey, those who cite, those who shirk.

The problem of evil must fit, for a bureaucrat, within a memo; a scientist, the treatment group; an artist, the limits of talent.

Too late to step on the garden snake . . . you have already fled into the jungle.

To lie in a puddle all day and recommend your chiropractor to everyone who steps on your spine . . . with a chivalry that leaves the jacket at home, the chiropractor takes seriously the notion of putting his back into his work to achieve success.

Heaping data on the most dubious hypothesis inundates it into a paradigm.

Scientific progress has turned death into a procrastination interrupted by an accident. Backpedaling against a waterfall, we are hit by a thunderbolt.

If only we would twist the butter knife, lipid revaccination wouldn’t need to wait for fat season.

A people must train for centuries to endure a single generation of freedom. Against two generations nothing can discipline them.

The liberator oppresses the under-trodden with promises their natures can’t deliver on.

Young Fritz von Hardenberg’s insistence, contra his catechism lessons, that the body is made of the same stuff as the soul was inversely correct: the soul is the tenderest part of the meat. To stifle the boy’s abstractedness the Prediger had only to give his dreams a good whipping.

The conversion of flesh into tumor helps one cope with spirituality.

To boil down the subtle ideas of the great books into diazepam and inject it into my veins. Instead of the gradual toxic buildup of detail by time and effort, a lethal dose of the elusiveness of enlightenment.

To take advantage of clarity before it grows into suprasensual understanding, one has only to think a pleasant thought.

One who distributes just actions like falling leaves but is niggardly with his affections, practicing all the hard virtues for want of capacity for the easy ones—who does not love—avoids the misfortunes of both the stampeded shepherd and the cuckolded rooster. Authoritarian figures are best suited to raise a vegetable farm, practicing bloodletting on beets and spanking the earth with a hoe.

Glancing both towards the orient and the occident, the universal mind is a cross-eyed half-breed.

There are no defeats in philosophy, only advances and withdrawals . . . until the shore erodes.

The most commonly shared trait among natural-born Americans is cheeseburger-concentrate in the placenta. America is a likeness discovered later, inside a fast food embassy.

Thieves break even as long as they lose both hands.

Charlatans of superiority crave the adulation of those they despise, dismissing private thoughts as a reward for molding their own to public opinion.

If only snow would fall up, so Heaven’s “good souls” might warm themselves . . .

The admirable emotions hackneyed by kitsch, those touched by the muse distance themselves from sentimentality by delineating the sideshow fervors instead. Instead of renovating the tabernacle of love to enchant more discriminating congregants, they build a fetish academy.

The Kyoto School: of all philosophy’s pollinators, the only ones who did more than send a bee over the fence.

Hard to occupy a middle rank in society and be without illusions. Such people were only raised high enough to set an example for those above them.

Every idea has been theorized before by someone who didn’t phrase it more memorably.

Like Saturn at a family reunion, we ravenously devour children, parents, cousins—all which threatens the integrity of the self, which renders it less than completely unique. Even the babysitter must go: the remunerated memories, especially, must be consumed.

In a telecommunications age the most efficient response is still the messenger’s head.

Until the nineteenth century there was no need for a hedonistic calculus—the suffering principle was the universal measure of the human condition. In the twenty-first century there is no possibility of one—the gauge burst in the twentieth.

Absent, absinthe: my artificial intoxications deprived of lucidity, I resort to spasming a clear and distinct delirium.

“Real-world” piety: for the professional laity even salvation is just another material ambition. Communion-goers, looking to double their transubstantiation, drink the blood of Jesus to micturate the gold of the magi.

So many stories devoted to redeeming our sympathy for bad men, not nearly enough showing the greater irresponsibility of good ones.

The overture to Napoleon’s downfall was not the 1812 campaign, but the 1796 sentimental novella.

Embracing a leper, marrying into Down syndrome—loving without beauty to take refuge in would be love’s bottomless substantiation, were not our flaws present to deny us purity even here. The tender mercies melt us through dirtiness . . .

“Politically correct” is the diplomatic way of describing the opponent’s position.

My only friends are philosophers no one has heard of. Less a waste of intimacy than to know philosophers everyone summarizes.

The fraudulent wits: it takes an amiable humor to brighten partial truths into boundless possibilities, exposing the totality of error that had always been hidden there.

No message in a bottle will ever find a shore if it can’t be put into a daily news bulletin. Unless a man sings from his soul’s catalogue of radio hits, he will end up like Schubert—a corpse stuffed with unheard lieder.

Widely quoted in essays and articles, my reputation will not be secure until I receive mention in suicide notes. A Werthervane.

Bones and organs: the ossuary decorates its walls with what surrounds our souls so the toccata can howl through them unobstructed.

Universal sainthood is a potluck where the congregation brings stale wafers, the hermits bring moldy manna, and no one is allowed to vomit.

The father of nations is Abraham, expatriates Isaac, citizens the ram.

It’s a waste feeling love’s weightlessness if you don’t tell your lover why you’ll have to be scraped off the pavement.

Man is a card sharp with a two of clubs up his sleeve.