endostoevskij.netStuff I've been reading2025-04-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/Filippo Cortime@filippocorti.netTenth of December2017-01-19T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9781408837368
They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever...
Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess.
We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us.
I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter.
There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. . . . Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust.
I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.
Filtering isn’t phoniness—it’s civilization.
]]>All That Man Is2017-05-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780224099776
Yesterday he experienced a sort of dark afternoon of the soul. Some hours of terrible negativity. A sense, essentially, that he had wasted his entire life, and now it was over. The sun was shining outside.
That's the thing about fate, the way you only understand what your fate is when it's too late to do anything about it.
Floating over the world, the hard earth fathoms down through shrouds of mist and vapour, the thought hit him like a missile. Wham. This is it. This is all there is. There is nothing else. A silent explosion. He is still staring out the window. This is all there is. It's not a joke. Life is not a joke.
He likes the little world of the university. He likes it. The fairy-tale topography of the town. A make-believe world of walled gardens. The quietness of summer. The stone-floored lodge, and the deferential porter. Yes, a make believe world, like something imagined by a child. Somewhere to hide.
Everything so settled, you see. It all happened a thousand years ago. And the medievalist sits in his study, in a shaft of sunlight, lost in a reverie of life on the far side of that immense lapse of time. The whole exercise is, in its way, a memento mori. A meditation on the effacing nature of time.
A free man should walk slowly, that's what the Greeks thought, says W. The slave hurries, but the free man can take all day.
It's a sign of the end, he says, when you can no longer make real distinctions.
I live each day as though it were the day after the last.
For me, the afternoon's always planning-time, world conquest-time, as W. calls it. I have to pretend to some kind of hold on the future, W. has noticed. It's like climber throwing up grappling hook, or Spiderman swinging by his squirted webs. I'm never happy in the moment, W. says. I'm never happy in the belly of the afternoon.
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited.
]]>The Hatred of Poetry2017-07-08T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9781910695159
The more abysmal the experience of the actual, the greater the implied heights of the virtual.
Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.
Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe — in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn't, forget about it. Though admittedly that is easier said than done. Apples can be forgotten about, but not bananas, not really. They don't in fact take at all well to being forgotten about. They wizen and stink of putrid and go almost black.
I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.
Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.
]]>The Physics of Sorrow2017-08-12T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9781940953090
It occurred to me, for the first time with such clarity that what remains are not the exceptional moments, not the events, but precisely the nothingeverhappens. Time, freed from the claim of exceptionality. [...] In the small and the insignificant — that's where lifes hides."
Old age is getting used to things.
Even if you weren’t born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven’t read Pseudo Longinus, haven’t heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language. As smoke from a chimney on a winter morning, as a slice of blue sky, as a cloud that reminds you of something from another world, as a pile of buffalo shit. The sublime is everywhere.
The world is set up in such as way that it looks obvious and irrefutable. But what would happen if for a moment we turned the whole system upside down and instead of the enduring, the constant, the eternal, and the dead, we decided to revere that which is fleeting, changeable, transitory, yet alive?
]]>What I Loved2017-09-19T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9781473639058
The recollections of an older man are different than those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, doors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts.
I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.
"Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs."
I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything.
We all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.
A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk decreed it. People are equal, not because Thomas Jefferson said so, but because God created them that way. Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature.
Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
The Worship of Man The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam. Islam is of course different from Communism, because Islam sees the superhuman order governing the world as the edict of an omnipotent creator god, whereas Soviet Communism did not believe in gods. But Buddhism too gives short shrift to gods, and yet we commonly classify it as a religion. Like Buddhists, Communists believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions. Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The similarity does not end there. Like other religions, Communism too has its holy scripts and prophetic books, such as Marx’s Das Kapital, which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Communism had its holidays and festivals, such as the First of May and the anniversary of the October Revolution. It had theologians adept at Marxist dialectics, and every unit in the Soviet army had a chaplain, called a commissar, who monitored the piety of soldiers and officers. Communism had martyrs, holy wars and heresies, such as Trotskyism. Soviet Communism was a fanatical and missionary religion. A devout Communist could not be a Christian or a Buddhist, and was expected to spread the gospel of Marx and Lenin even at the price of his or her life. Religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order. The theory of relativity is not a religion, because (at least so far) there are no human norms and values that are founded on it. Football is not a religion because nobody argues that its rules reflect superhuman edicts. Islam, Buddhism and Communism are all religions, because all are systems of human norms and values that are founded on belief in a superhuman order.
]]>Darker With The Lights On2017-10-21T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780995705258
What was once fully there, absented itself over time in tiny increments, each one unnoticed by me. I recall now a fragment of something hard and white in the sink, something soft torn and vinegary in the bedside waste-basket. A tooth, a stockings, what I remember least.
Ellen’s voice has gone. First, I lost what she had said, all those everyday weaves of words that make one belong or angry or lost. Then I forgot how she spoke: the pitch, the timbre, the rhythm. Maybe she was one of those people whose everyday statement rises querulously at the end, suggesting that everything is in question. I say something aloud; I think I might have forgotten what the human voice sounds like.
Following the beautiful or ugly animal necessities, pretence is how life comes about. Pretence shaped by the pretence of others, pressured by time like air weighing on a lake, or rock saddled on rock, or great, impermanent expanses of nothing grinding away on nothing. I told myself I had governance over the passing objects, some of them personas. I acted part of a part that was necessary. I read enchantment in everything dead. How fresh and lovely is disbelief, flowering in the mind. I faked enlightenment. I made a flicker. What exactly? Mush in the head. Thinking, thinking.
Play is not fun. It is what we must do in order to live. If I win I might live well before I die but, nonetheless, I experience the aguish of playing the game. Anxiety is the primary condition of play. Our smiles are grimaces. Our laughter: the sound of rage surging up from out guts. Most of you people are the product of a mentality that see idleness as the enemy of material progress.
Disenchantment is how the game ends. The rules become, not just apparent, but the only visible part of play; the spirit has departed, the players are brought low and what was spontaneous and jubilant — the broad, chaotic joy — becomes cramped and weakened until the last, fading, playing soul, palms held out, voices the breath of a cry saying "peace, peace" but meaning "end me".
Nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.
Would you know what he meant if the author said he never really saw her face, that faces were fictions he increasingly could not read, a reductive way of building features in the memory, even if that memory was then projected into the present, onto the area between the forehead and the chin? He could, of course, enumerate the features: gray-blue eyes, what they call a full mouth, thick eyebrows that she was probably careful to have threaded, a small scar high on the left cheek, and so on. And sometimes these features did briefly integrate into an higher-order unity, as letters integrate into words, words into sentence. But like words dissolving into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and plots, combining these element into a face required forgetting them, letting them dematerialize into an effect, and that somehow never happened for long with Hannah.
"I promised to pass through a series of worlds with you," I remembered from her vows.
His narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation.
So much of the most important personal news I'd received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially the events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln Center, where, beside the fountain, I took a call from Jon informing me that, for whatever complex of reasons, a friend had shot himself; mark the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where I read the message (\"Apologies for the mass e-mail...\") a close cousin sent out describing the dire condition of her newborn; waiting in line at the post office on Atlantic, the adhan issuing from the adjacent mosque, I received your wedding announcement and was shocked to be shocked, crushed, and started a frightening multi week descent, worse for being so embarrassingly cliched; while in the bathroom at the SoHo Crate and Barrel--the finest semipublic restroom in lower Manhattan--I learned I'd been awarded a grant that would take me overseas for a summer, and so came to associate the corner of Broadway and Houston with all that transpired in Morocco; at Zucotti Park I heard my then-girlfriend was not--as she'd been convinced--pregnant; while buying discounted dress socks at the Century 21 department store across from Ground Zero, I was informed by text that a friend in Oakland had been hospitalized after the police had broken his ribs. And so on: each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.
He had not merely said "welcome" but "welcome back", as though he somehow knew that she was back. She thanked him, and in the grey of the evening darkness, the air burdened with smells, she ached with an almost unbearable emotion that she could not name. It was nostalgic and melancholy, a beautiful sadness for the things she had missed and the things she would never know. Later, sitting on the couch in Ranyinudo's small stylish living room, her feet sunk into the too-soft carpet, the flat-screen TV perched on the opposite wall, Ifemelu looked unbelievingly at herself. She had done it. She had come back.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
Ifemelu decided to stop faking an American accent on a sunlit day in July, the same day she met Blaine. It was convincing, the accent. She had perfected, from careful watching of friends and newscasters, the blurring of the t, the creamy roll of the r, the sentences starting with "so," and the sliding response of "oh really," but the accent creaked with consciousness, it was an act of will. It took an effort, the twisting of lip, the curling of tongue. If she were in a panic, or terrified, or jerked awake during a fire, she would not remember how to produce those American sounds.
Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.
In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters."
- "And so began her heady days full of cliché: she felt fully alive, her heart beat faster when he arrived at the door, and she viewed each morning like the unwrapping of a gift. [...] This was love, to be eager for tomorrow.
When she told him about her American life, he listened with a keenness close to desperation. He wanted to be part of everything she had done, be familiar with every emotion she had felt. Once she had told him, "The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place."
Each memory stunned her with its blinding luminosity. Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss, a great burden hurtling towards her, and she wished she could duck, lower herself so that it would bypass her, so that she would save herself.
Un uomo era andato a dormire che era credente, si era svegliato che era ateo. Per fortuna, nella stanza di quest'uomo c'era una bilancia medica decimale, e quest'uomo era abituato a pesarsi tutti i giorni, mattino e sera. Così, andando a dormire il giorno prima, l'uomo si era pesato e aveva scoperto che pesava 4 pud e 21 funt. E il giorno dopo, al mattino, dopo essersi svegliato che era ateo, l'uomo si era pesato ancora e aveva scoperto che pesava in tutto 4 pud e 13 funt. "Di conseguenza", aveva pensato l'uomo, "la mia fede pesava intorno agli 8 funt."
A me interessano solo le scemenze; solo quello che non ha nessun senso pratico. Mi interessa la vita solo nelle sue manifestazioni assurde. Eroismo, pathos, audacia, moralità, pulizia, etica, commozione e fervore sono parole e sentimenti che non posso sopportare. Ma capisco perfettamente e apprezzo: entusiasmo e ammirazione, ispirazione e disperazione, passione e riservatezza, dissoluzione e castità, tristezza e dolore, felicità e riso.
Io comunque sono una figura stupefacente, anche se non mi piace molto parlarne.
Per una persona adulta la presenza dei bambini è offensiva. E ecco, ai tempi del grande imperatore Aleksandr Vil'berdat, mostrare a una persona adulta un bambino veniva considerata la massima offesa. Era peggio che sputare in faccia a uno, anche se lo si beccava, diciamo in una narice. L'offesa del bambino dava origine in genere a un duello all'ultimo sangue.
Io rispetto solo le giovani donne sane e formose. Gli altri rappresentanti dell'umanità li guardo con diffidenza.
And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.
At the bottom of all this lies the principle that the countercultural philosophers of the 1950s and '60s, Alan Watts, echoing Aldous Huxley, labelled 'the law of reverse effort,' or the 'backwards law': the notion that in all sorts of contexts, from our personal lives to politics, all this trying to make everything right is a big part of what's wrong. Or, to quote Watts, that 'when you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink'; but when you try to sink, you float and that 'insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.' In many cases, wrote Huxley, 'the harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed'.
For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones.
We elevate those things we want, those things we would prefer to have, into things we believe we must have; we feel we must perform well in certain circumstances, or that other people must treat us well. Because we think these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not.
The fact that we desire some things, and dislike or hate others, is what motivates virtually every human activity. Rather than merely enjoying pleasurable things during the moments in which they occur, and experiencing the unpleasantness of painful things, we develop the habits of clinging an aversion: we grasp at what we like, trying to hold onto it forever.
What motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn't any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it's something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. [...] We invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future — not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.
'He should think of himself more like a frog,' she said. 'You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored, then when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.'
Insecurity is the essential nature of reality. [...] The collapse of your apparent security represents a confrontation with life as it really is. 'Things are not permanent, they don't last, there is no final security,' she says. What makes us miserable is not this truth, but our efforts to escape it.
Impermanence is the nature of the universe; that 'the only constant is change'.
Watts: 'Life is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance'.
Lao Tzu: 'A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent upon arriving.'
If Shopenhauer and Stifter were still alive, I would invite them both along with Wittgenstein, but Shopenhauer and Stifter are no longer alive, so I will only invite Wittgenstein. And when I think of it just now, thus said Goethe at the window, with his right hand supported by his cane, Wittgenstein is the greatest of all.
Every remark of mine was met by their misunderstanding and with this misunderstanding their assiduous vulgarity. Thus over the decades I have said less and less and finally nothing more, and their lectures have become evermore ruthless.
Waking up was nothing more than looking into hell.
We see our lives as a collection of experiences: "the day I met those people at the party"; "the night I lost my virginity"; "the feeling I had as a tourist in Paris" or "when I stood at the lake in the woods". These snow globes and beach rocks can be held on to, compared, and appraised for quality. You put them on a shelf, and take them down; or lie awake at night, just wondering at them. They come with stories, and you put forward your experiences as rivals to the experiences others can tell. We become lifelong collectors, and count on fixed memories to provide the substance of whatever other aims we may declare, when asked, are our real goals or reasons to live."
The meaning of life always comes down to a method of life.
Build peaks, and former highlands become flatlands — ordinary topography loses its allure. The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste.
The discipline is to learn to see the rest of the world in just the same way. Let anyone's ordinary face fascinate you as if it were a bust of Caesar. [...] «For anything to become interesting, you simply have to look at it for a long time» wrote Flaubert. Life becomes the scene of total, never-ending experience. [...] For the adept of aestheticism, experience is not rare; it is always available.
Regard all things as you would a work of art.
Perfectionism, in contract, puts the self before everything. It charges the self with weighing and choosing every behaviour and aspect of its way of living. The process of weighing — so as to 'live deliberately', in Thoreau's phrase — becomes the form of experience in perfectionism. You learn to consider the people and the things of the world as if each might suggest an example of a way you, too, could be. In becoming an example, each thing invites you to measure and change yourself.
Regard all things as if they were examples.
Experience tries to evade the disappointment of this world by adding peaks to it. Life becomes a race against time and a contest you try to win. Aestheticism and perfectionism make a modern attempt to transcend this world by a more intense attention to it — every day and in every situation. [...] One lives one's life for the daily goal of transcending, if only by a disciple of mind, the dull conditions that we fake and that someday will kill us. You live by methods that await you, at your call. You know they can go on, even to your last view of the sky, and the final question you put yourself. This, if not the last and best answer, certainly not the only answer, is still what we have longed to know. It is the meaning of life.
Stoic reason makes a man absolute master of his judgments and eradicates everything that is bad while clarifying the only thing that is truly good: the right use of choice."
Because moralists had said for so many centuries, "Sex must be controlled because it is so powerful and important," sexual liberators were seduced into saying, in opposition, "Sex must be liberated because it is so powerful and important." But in fact a better liberation would have occurred if reformers had freed sex not by its centrality to life, but by its triviality. They could have said: "Sex is a biological function — and for that reason no ground to persecute anyone."
This means that the de-emphasis of sex and the denigration of youth will have to start with an act of willful revaluation. It will require preferring the values of adulthood: intellect over enthusiasm, autonomy over adventure, elegance over vitality, sophistication over innocence — and, perhaps, a pursuit of the confirmation or repetition of experience rather than experiences of novelty.
We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters
The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.
That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.
It's all right to forget, you know, he said. It's good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.
La tecnologia oggi assolve un doppio ruolo comunque estremamente importante: ci solleva dalla parte meccanica dell'umanità e molto spesso ci mantiene lontani anche dalle complicazioni dei suoi utilizzi più alti. Potremmo ma non vogliamo, e questa è una delle ragioni sostanziali, la ragione numero uno, per cui la nostra è una generazione a bassa risoluzione.
Per qualche ragione che non comprendo uno dei valori meno apprezzati nei nostri tempi è il silenzio.
La fine della tastiera è un altro dei punti di snodo del passaggio dell'informatica amatorial verso la bassa risoluzione. Senza la tastiera i terminali di accesso a internet diventano interfacce sempre più monodirezionali. [...] Una specie di nuovo piccolo televisore che fa alcune cose in più.
A noi interessa quasi esclusivamente la memoria instantanea, quella che collega gli eventi del nostro presente.
Dovremo immaginare un punto di intersezione fra superficie e profondità, fra il nostro volare leggeri a cavallo della tecnologia e l'ostinazione di quel pittore che dipingeva un bottone. Solo le due cose assieme potranno essere domani quello che un tempo chiamavamo cultura: entrambe, unite indissolubilmente, saranno domani ciò che continueremo a chiamare cultura.
It's a great mystery to him, his eternal capacity for hope and the eternal destruction of his capacity for hope.
It's our great fortune to live at the periphery.
I keep a mental list of W.'s favourite questions, which he constantly asks me so as to ask himself. — 'At what point did you realise that you would amount to nothing?'; 'When was it that you first became aware you would be nothing but a failure?'; 'When you look back at your life, what do you see?'; 'How is it that you know what greatness is, and that you will never, ever reach it?'
[Nietzsche] protests against the fact that we assign a purpose to things and to the world. For him, the world has no purpose, and we have no choice but to laugh at that which is. To laugh at the world as a game that pulls the ground out from under the subject, leaving it to float over the abyss of ontological inconsistency, is to play a game whose meaning remains suspended.
As hyperbolic, empty, toxic categories, truth, reality, freedom, justice, the subject, and so on, point to the holes in the fabric of fact by indicating its fragmentary nature. Our world — what we refer as our world — is a porous web of facts. It lacks all consistency and conclusiveness. It contains grounds but has no one ground.
The experience of the beautiful remains open to the incommensurable, which eludes direct experience. The beautiful is the portion of it that manages to communicate itself anyway.
Fragility is an ontological attribute of reality. Reality is always generated over the abyss of its own fragility. It indicates the instability of all facts, along with the arbitrariness of all semiological mythologies. It's sometimes said that logos is that which distances itself from myth. On closer inspection, it's clear that any logos architecture produces its own mythology."
To "hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle" — that could be the definition of artistic practice.
The beautiful is not that which is given and known. We experience beauty at the borders of the given and known, where meaning begins to slip and the senses fail.
Today, reality presents itself as a system of choices. To decide, on the other hand, means not to choose from the given choices.
Adhering to established opinions is the subject's standby mode.
There is no thought without simplification because thought is the reduction of complexity through abstraction. What we call reality is excessively complex.
La mia allegria è dolorosa come il mio dolore. [...] Fra me e la vita c'è un vetro sottile. E per quanto nitidamente veda e comprenda la vita, non lo posso toccare.
Non sentir mai sinceramente i propri sentimenti, ed elevare il proprio pallido trionfo al punto da guardare con indifferenza le poprie ambizioni, ansie e desideri; passare dalle proprie allegrie o angosce come chi passa attraverso qualcosa che non gli interessa.
Di quante complesse ottusità sarà fatta la comprensione che gli altri hanno di noi! [...] Le parole degli altri sono errori del nostro udire, naufragi del nostro intendere.
La bellezza delle rovine? Non servire più a niente.
Le nostre più grandi tragedie si compiono nell'idea che ci facciamo di noi stessi.
Non ho mai imparato a esistere.
Quel che mi sento di essere, non so mai se lo sono davvero, o se solo credo di esserlo.
Non ho mai fatto altro che sognare. È stato questo, solo questo, il senso della mia vita. Non ho mai avuto altra vera preoccupazione se non il mio scenario interiore. I maggiori dolori della mia vita sfumano quando, aprendo la finestra sulla strada dei miei vaneggiamenti, non ne vedo più il movimento.
Le cose che più amiamo, o pensiamo di amare, assumono il loro pieno valore quando semplicemente le sogniamo.
L'immensa serie di persone e di cose che compongono il mondo è per me un'interminabile galleria di quadri. [...] Per me l'umanità è un gran motivo decorativo, che vivo tramite vista e udito. Dalla vita non voglio altro che stare a guardarla.
Mi ha sempre preoccupato, in quegli occasionali momenti di distacco in cui prendiamo coscienza di noi stessi in quanto individui altri per gli altri, immaginare la figura che farò fisicamente, e persino moralmente, per quelli che mi guardano e mi parlano, tutti i giorni o occasionalmente.
Guardo, come in una distesa al sole che sguarcia le nuvole, la mia vita passata; e noto, con metafisico sbalordimento, come tutti i miei gesti più sicuri, le mie idee più chiare, e i miei propositi più logici, non sono stati, alla fine, nient'altro che una ubriacatura congenita, una pazzia naturale, una grande ignoranza. Non ho neanche recitato. Sono stato recitato.
Non sapere di sé è vivere.
La noia è la sensazione carnale dell'eterna futilità delle cose.
Tra la vita degli uomini e quella degli animali non c'è alcuna differenza, se non la maniera con cui si ingannano o la ignorano.
La letteratura è la maniera più gradevole di ignorare la vita.
La noia non è la malattia del fastidio di non aver niente da fare, ma la malattia ancora più grave di sentire che non vale la pena fare niente. Quante volte sollevo dal registro su cui sto scrivendo e su cui lavoro la testa vuota di tutto il mondo! Sarebbe meglio starmene a oziare, senza far niente, senza avere niente da fare, perché almeno mi godrei quella noia, anche se reale.
Nostalgia! Ho nostalgia perfino di quel che per me non è stato niente, per l'angoscia della fuga del tempo e la malattia del mistero della vita. Volti che vedevo abitualmente nei miei soliti tragitti — se non li vedo più mi intristisco; e non sono stati niente per me, se non il simbolo di tutta la vita.
La libertà è la possibilità di isolarsi. Sei libero se puoi allontanarti dagli uomini, senza che il bisogno di denaro, o il bisogno di aggregazione, o l'amore, o la gloria, o la curiosità, che nel silenzio e nella solitudine non trovano alimento, ti obblighino a cercarli. Se ti è impossibile vivere da solo, allora sei nato schiavo.
]]>Nostalgia for the Absolute2018-08-03T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780887845949
The most energetic among us have long known that the truth is more complex than man's needs, that it may be wholly extraneous and even inimical to these needs. It was a deeply optimist belief, held by classical Greek thought and certainly by rationalism in Europe, that the truth was somehow a friend to man, that whatever you discovered would finally benefit the species.
A true mythology will develop its own language, its own characteristic idiom, its own set of emblematic images, flags, metaphors, dramatic scenarios. It pictures the world in terms of certain cardinal gestures, rituals, and symbols. [...] They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely antireligious, which may postulate a world without God and may deny an afterlife, but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and in effect.
For this, I believe, is what the post-religious or surrogate theologies and all the varieties of the irrational have proved to be — illusions. The Marxist promise is cruelly bankrupt. The Freudian programme of liberation has been only very partially fulfilled. The Lévi-Straussian prognostication is one of ironic chastisement. The Zodiac, the spooks, and the platitudes of the guru will not still our hunger. One further alternative remains. The foundation of personal existence on the pursuit of the objective scientific truth: the way of the philosophic and exact sciences.
The German philosopher, Heidegger, puts it well. He says, questions are the piety, the prayer, of human thought. I am trying to put it a little more brutally. We, in the West, are an animal built to ask questions and to try and get answers regardless of the cost.
Today the prospect of having to get used to the presence of another body, of someone else getting used to mine, exhausts me in advance.
I discover that I am alone in the monument, alone surrounded by light, alone in this space with its disconcerting proportions; the circle of the immense cupola is welcoming, and hundreds of windows surround me — I sit down cross-legged. I am moved to the point of tears but I do not cry, I feel lifted up from the earth and I run my eyes over the Izmit faience inscriptions, the painted surroundings, everything glitters, then a great calm seizes me, a wrenching calm, a summit glimpsed, but very soon the beauty eludes and rejects me — little by little I rediscover my sense; what my eyes perceive now indeed looks magnificent to me, but has nothing in common with the sensation I've just felt. A great sadness grips me, suddenly, a loss, a sinister vision of the reality of the world and all its imperfections, its pain, a sadness accentuated by the perfection of the building and a phrase comes to me: only the proportions are divine, the rest belongs to humans.
We play our sonata all alone without realising the piano is out of tune, overcome by our emotions: others hear how off-key we sound, and at best feel sincere pity, at worse a terrible annoyance at being confronted with our humiliation.
The times are so bad I've decided to talk to myself.
None of the words come back to me, no speech, everything has fortunately been erased; only her sightly serious face remains and the upwelling of pain, the sensation of suddenly becoming an object in time, crushed by the fist of shame and thrust towards disappearance.
Their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them — I can't even recall which one it was — stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.
It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting.
I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.
What you don't know and don't make an effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into the knowledge of.
The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight.
And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?
I would like to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity.
Perché la vita umana, non è forse un breve ciclone dell'anima? È anche un'eclissi dell'anima. È come se tutti noi fossimo ubriachi, solo ognuno per conto suo, uno ha bevuto di più, l'altro di meno.
Ecco perché ho vergogna: ho appena fatto il conto che da via Čechov fino a questo androne ho bevuto ancora per sei rubli, ma cosa ho bevuto? E dove? E in che ordine? E ho bevuto per il mio bene o per il mio male? Nessuno lo sa e, ormai, nessuno lo saprà mai. Non sappiamo ancora: è stato lo zar Boris a uccidere lo zarevič Dimitrij o viceversa?
Impara ad affliggerti, che di godersela anche i coglioni sono capaci.
La prima edizione di Mosca – Petuški, dato che era in un esemplare solo, si è esaurita rapidamente. Da allora mi sono arrivate molte lamentele per il capitolo «Serp i molot – Karačarovo», del tutto a sproposito, devo dire. Nell’introduzione alla prima edizione avevo avvisato tutte le fanciulle che il capitolo «Serp i molot – Karačarovo» dovevano saltarlo senza leggerlo perché dopo la frase «E giù a bere» seguiva una pagina e mezza di turpiloquio schietto, tanto che nell’intero capitolo non c’era una sola parola castigata, a parte la frase «E giù a bere». Con quel coscienzioso avviso ho ottenuto solo che tutti i lettori, soprattutto le fanciulle, si son buttati subito sul capitolo «Serp i molot – Karačarovo» senza neanche leggere i capitoli precedenti, senza neanche aver letto la frase «E giù a bere». Per questo motivo ho considerato indispensabile, nella seconda edizione, sopprimere dal capitolo «Serp i molot – Karačarovo» il turpiloquio. E così è meglio perché, prima di tutto, mi leggeranno dall’inizio alla fine e, secondariamente, non si offenderà nessuno.
A partire dalla primavera dell'85, non so perché, ho cominciato a star sempre meglio. Secondo me, prima che sia tardi, è ora di ricominciare a decadere.
Un mio conoscente diceva che la voka al coriandolo agisce sull'uomo in senso antiumano, cioé rinvigorisce la membra e indebolisce l'anima.
Io, se voglio capire, trovo posto per tutti. Io non ho una testa, ho una casa di tolleranza.
E se un giorno morirò (morirò molto presto, lo so), morirò senza aver accettato questo mondo, avendolo compreso da vicino e da lontano, da fuori e da dentro, ma senza averlo accettato, morirò e Lui mi chiederà: 'Sei stato bene lì? Sei stato male?', e io starò zitto.
]]>Luce d'estate ed è subito notte2018-12-09T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788870915174
Deve spezzarsi qualcosa dentro, per esempio una corda nel cuore, quando la persona che credi di conoscere a fondo, che ha acceso la tua fiamma, che hai sposato, con cui hai fatto dei figli, hai costruito una casa e dei ricordi, ti appare un giorno all'improvviso come un perfetto estraneo. A dire il vero è un'idizioa bella e buona sostenere di conoscere a fondo qualcuno, c'è sempre un angolo che resta nel buio, nell'ombra, a volte anche un intero edificio.
L'esistenza è soggettiva, ovvero tutto ciò che hai in testa automaticamente esiste.
Dice parole che preferiamo non ripetere, sono belle per come le dice, intessute nel suo respiro, nella sua voce, nel suo sguardo, metterle su carta senza tutto questo non farebbe che sminuirle.
Ci vogliono più di sei birre per scrivere tuo, tuo è una parola da almeno dieci birre, sì, tuo è una parola da dieci birre.
]]>The Cost of Living2018-12-12T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780241267998
Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don't believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world. Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don't want to hold it together.
Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced 20 years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting waves over my head. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realized I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. My marriage was the boat and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown. It is also the ghost that will always haunt my life. I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are. I am not sure I have often witnessed love that achieves all of these things, so perhaps this ideal is fated to be a phantom.
The night is softer than the day, quieter, sadder, calmer, the sound of the wind tapping windows, the hissing of pipes, the entropy that makes floorboards creak, the ghostly night bus that comes and goes — and always in cities, a far-off distant sound that resembles the sea, yet is just life, more life.
All the images will disappear. [...] They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. [...] Thousands of words, the ones used to name things, faces, acts and feelings, to put the world in order, make the heart beat and the sex grow moist, will suddenly be nullified.
Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence an no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.
Other people's memories gave us a place in the world.
When she can't sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept. [...] She doesn't know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such time.
She would like to capture the light that suffuses faces that can no longer be seen and tables groaning with vanished food, the light that was already present in the stories of Sundays in childhood and has continued to settle upon things from the moment they are lived, a light from before. To save.
To save something from the time where we will never be again.
]]>La grande russia portatile2019-01-03T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788893816779]]>Zoo: Or, Letters Not about Love2019-02-02T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780801406560
The same men are still attached to me and show no signs of abandoning their posts. The third one has virtually pinned himself to me. I consider him my most outstanding decoration.
I'm not going to write about love. I'm going to write about only about the weather. The weather in Berlin is nice today.
You gave me two assignments. 1) Not to call you. 2.) Not to see you.
In this letter, the author attempts to be light-hearted and cheerful, but I know for sure that in the next letter he won't be able to carry it off.
Naturally, a thing has only itself to blame if it doesn't know how to become loved. Especially things equipped with hands.
I don't feel like writing anymore. I have no use for letters; I have no use for a guitar. And I don't care one way or the other whether my love is like a stationary transmission. I just don't care. I know one thing: you won't even put my letter in the basket on the right side of your table.
You don't know — and that's just as well — that many words are forbidden. forbidden are words about flowers. Forbidden is spring. In general, all the good words are faint with exhaustion. I'm sick of wit and irony. Your letter made me envious. How I want to describe objects as if literature had never existed; the way one could write literarily.
You are violating our pact. You are writing me two letters a day.
Quit writing about HOW, HOW, HOW much you love me, because at the third how much, I start thinking about something else.
The imaginary horizontal lines that circle the earth make sense. Our equator is 0°, the North and South Poles are 90°. Latitude’s order is airtight with clear and elegant motives. The earth has a top and a bottom. Longitude is another story. There isn’t a left and right to earth. Any line could have been called 0°. But Greenwich got first dibs on the prime meridian and as a result the world set clocks and ships by a British resort town that lies outside London.
It was an arbitrary choice that became the basis for precision. My father knew a family named Wolfawitz who wanted to go on vacation but didn’t know where.
It hit them. Take a two-week road trip driving to as many towns, parks, and counties as they could that contained their last name: Wolfpoint, Wolfville, Wolf Lake, etc.
They read up and found things to do on the way to these other Wolf spots: a hotel in a railroad car, an Alpine slide, a pretzel factory, etc.
The Wolfawitzes ended up seeing more than they planned. Lots of unexpected things popped up along the route.
When they came back from vacation, they felt really good. It was easily the best vacation of their lives, and they wondered why.
My father says it was because the Wolfawitzes stopped trying to accomplish anything. They just put a carrot in front of them and decided the carrot wasn’t that important but chasing it was.
The story of the Wolfawitzes’ vacation was told hundreds of times to hundreds of customers in the small restaurant that my mom and dad ran in Greenwich Village. Each time it was told, my dad would conclude that the vacation changed the Wolfawitzes’ whole life, and this was how they were going to live from now on — chasing a very, very small carrot.
]]>Eleven Kinds of Loneliness2019-02-13T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780099518570]]>In tutto c'è stata bellezza2019-03-07T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788823522459
Magari si potesse misurare il dolore umano con numeri chiari e non con parole incerte. Magari ci fosse un modo di sapere quanto abbiamo sofferto, e il dolore fosse materiale e misurabile. Un giorno o l'altro l'uomo finisce per affrontare l'inconsistenza del suo passaggio nel mondo. Ci sono esseri umani che riescono a sopportarlo, io non lo sopporterò mai. [...] La vanità delle conversazioni, la vanità di chi parla, la vanità di chi risponde. Le vanità pattuite perché il mondo possa esistere.
C'è poco da dire sullo sgretolarsi di tutte le cose che sono state.
Entrava sempre una luce molto forte in casa dei miei che faceva perdere consistenza ai fatti, perché la luce è più potente delle azioni umane.
In questo istante mi accorgo anche che nella mia vita non sono successe grandi cose, e tuttavia porto dentro di me una profonda sofferenza. Il dolore non è assolutamente un impedimento alla gioia, così come io intendo il dolore, perché per me è legato all'intensificazione della coscienza. La sofferenza è una coscienza espansa che raggiunge tutte le cose che sono e saranno. È una specie di amabilità segreta verso tutte le cose. Cortesia verso tutto ciò che è stato.
Io sono l'unica persona a questo mondo che lo ricorda ogni giorno. E ogni giorno contempla il suo venir meno, che finisce per trasformarsi in purezza. Non è che lo ricordi ogni giorno, è che lo sento dentro di me in modo permanente.
Vivere ossessionato dal passato non ti lascia godere il presente, ma godere del presente senza che il peso del passato partecipi con la sua desolazione a quel presente non è un godimento, bensì un'alienazione.
Mio padre cercava sempre di lasciare la macchina all'ombra. Se non ci riusciva, gli si guastava l'umore. [...] Ci svegliavamo prestissimo per andare al mare, perché se arrivavamo tardi non trovava il posto per lasciare la macchina sotto certi eucalipti.
Vorrei salvare quella tenerezza, la tenerezza con cui mia madre mi aiutava a fare la valigia quando partivo da Barbastro per Saragozza in quegli anni, nel 1980, nel 1981, nel 1982, le cose che mi metteva in valigia, come mi aiutava con gli indumenti, come mi metteva del cibo in vasetti di vetro, e io poi guardavo tutta quella roba e mi vinceva lo sconforto.
Guardare la vita di mio padre, questo avrei dovuto fare ogni giorno, a lungo.
Mi faceva male in particolare lo sgretolarsi della tenerezza. Mi vengono in mente frasi che lei diceva, piene di bontà. Allora capii che la morte di un rapporto è in realtà la morte di un linguaggio segreto. [...] Due persone, quando si innamorano e si frequentano e convivono e si amano, creano un idioma che appartiene soltanto a loro. Quell'idioma privato, pieno di neologismi, inflessioni, campi semantici e sottointesi, ha solamente due parlanti. Comincia a morire quando si separano. Muore del tutto quando i due incontrano nuovi partner, inventano un nuovi linguaggi, superano il lutto che sopravvive a ogni morte. Sono milioni, le lingue morte.
Amavamo l'immobilità delle montagne. Il loro stare lì. Le montagne non sono, stanno. Anche la nostra vita fu stare. L'esistenza di mio padre fu una rivendicazione dello stare al di sopra dell'essere.
La gente non seppellisce elettrodomestici vecchi, ma c'è gente a questo mondo che ha passato più tempo accanto a un televisore o a un frigorifero che accanto a un essere umano. In tutto c'è stata bellezza.
Funzioniamo così, noi esseri umani: ci sono persone che, pur essendo vive, non frequentiamo mai più, e raggiungono così lo stesso statuto dei morti.
Il 1980 è identico al 2015. Tutti vogliono avere successo, è la stessa cosa. Il successo e i soldi, è la stessa cosa. Tu, alla fine, ti sei messo a guardare la televisione. Io navigo su Internet, che è la stessa cosa. Evolve tecnologicamente il nostro modo di dormire o di morire.
Non mi aspetta nessuno da nessuna parte, ed è questo che è successo nella mia vita, che devo imparare a camminare per le strade, per le città, dove mi capita, sapendo che non mi aspetta nessuno alla fine del viaggio. Nessuno si preoccuperà se arrivo o non arrivo. Allora si cammina in un'altra maniera. Dalla maniera di camminare si può sapere se ti aspetta qualcuno o se non ti aspetta nessuno.
Non diciamo mai tutta la verità perché se la dicessimo manderemo in pezzi l'universo, che funziona attraverso ciò che è ragionevole, ciò che è sopportabile.
La verità è sempre in costante trasformazione, perciò è difficile dirla, indicarla. Piuttosto, è sempre in fuga. Piuttosto, l'importante è riflettere il suo continuo movimento, la sua irregolare e disinvoltura metamorfosi.
Ero un disertore, mio padre era un disertore. Passò gli ultimi anni a contemplare la sua diserzione e a tentare di scoprire da cosa aveva disertato. Lo stesso sta succedendo ora a me: non so da cosa ho disertato. Tutta l'opera di Kafka cerca la stessa cosa: da cosa ho disertato? Da dove me ne sono andato? Dove sto andando adesso?
La morte di mio padre fu anche la scomparsa di una gestualità, di determinati movimenti corporei, del colore di certi occhi, che non rivedrò mai più. Una forma di espressività nelle mani, nelle braccia, nello sguardo, nelle labbra, nelle gambe. E se mi dimentico di lui, mi dimentico di quei gesti.
]]>How to Do Nothing2019-03-11T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9781612197494
The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn't to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.
To resist in place is to make onself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one's career, and individual entrepreneurship.
I learned that patters of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.
Obtuseness is a moral failing. Failure to notice particulars is a special form of ignorance, a blindness to subtle but salient information. [...] Living morally requires more of us than innocence. To be innocent is indeed to dwell in ignorance, especially of moral matters.
Thomas Pynchon: "Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well."
Knowledge is not only exploding; it is evolving into highly specialized forms. [...] To cope, we increasingly rely on what Ungar calls "pre-digested knowledge packets" — summaries, abstracts, blurbs, cut lines, headlines, and articles that promise "the five things you need to know about X."
Ignorance is often the privilege of the powerful. One in power has the luxury of not needing to know.
Facts about even one physical object are inexhaustible. [...] Facts are infinite in number because the detail of the world is inexhaustible.
When we picture ignorance as a horizon, we recognize that not only it changes with our knowledge but is constructed by our knowing. [...] Our learning responds to (some) ignorance, eliminates (some) ignorance, manages (some) ignorance, creates a refined and restructured ignorance.
All that is knowable but unknown — the horizon of our ignorance — is unrealized possibility.
Yet in life as we live it, knowledge is constructed within an epistemic community; it is possessed and justified or rejected in epistemic interactions of a community. [...] Epistemic dependence is not only frequently necessary, but in some situations, such as deferral to experts, it may be epistemically virtuous or even obligatory.
]]>Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti2019-04-13T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788807470110
Il significato del racconto sta infatti proprio in questo semplice risultare che non consegue ad alcun progetto, e nell'utilità figurale del disegno. Il disegno — non dei tratti confusi, ma l'unità di una figura — non è ciò che guida fin dall'inizio il percorso di una vita, bensì ciò che tale vita si lascia dietro, senza poterlo mai prevedere e neanche immaginare. [...] "Tutti i dolori sono sopportabili se li si inserisce in una storia o si racconta una storia su di essi", scrive Karen Blixen; e Hannah Arendt commenta, "la storia rivela il significato di ciò che altrimenti rimarrebbe una sequenza intollerabile di eventi".
La vita non può essere vissuta come una storia, perché la storia viene sempre dopo, risulta.
Nel generale spettacolo esibitivo che Arendt ci consegna, l'apparire non è infatti il fenomeno superficiale di una più intima e più vera "essenza". L'apparire è il tutto dell'essere inteso come finitezza plurale dell'esistere. [...] Ciascuno di noi è chi appare agli altri nella sua unicità e distinzione.
Ognuno di noi si vive come la propria storia, senza poter distinguere l'io che narra dal sé che viene narrato.
Non sono le vite a fornire i modelli ma le storie. Ed è difficile costruire storie alle quali adeguare le vite. Possiamo soltanto ri-narrare e vivere secondo le storie che abbiamo letto e sentito. Noi viviamo le nostre vite attraverso i testi.
Intollerabile, dunque, non è tanto una vita che "è sempre stata un no" e che a cinquant'anni la vede povera, sposata e senza figli, bensì il fatto che la storia di vita che ne è risultata rimanga senza narrazione. [...] La tradizione patriarcale tende a sintetizzare nel catalogo delle qualità femminili che riducono il chi a che cosa: una madre, una moglie, un'infermiera. Al di fuori di queste qualità, ossia al di fuori dell'ordine rappresentativo, le donne verrebbero dunque a esistere solo in senso empirico.
L'unicità del sé, per di più colpevolmente pretesa come reale e materialmente esistente, altro non è che una costruzione ideologica del canone autobiografico.
]]>You know you want this2019-06-20T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9781787331105]]>Cento poesie d'amore a Ladyhawke2019-06-25T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788806181123]]>Viaggio al termine della notte2019-09-15T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788863801729
Si faceva la coda per andare a crepare.
È il coraggio che in fondo è indecente. Fare i coraggiosi con il proprio corpo?
Tutto una vibrazione, un irraggiamento, m'avrebbe voluto lei e io, da parte mia, non capivo assolutamente perché avrei dovuto essere in quello stato lì, sublime, vedevo al contrario mille ragioni, tutte inconfutabili, per restare d'un umore esattamente contrario.
Tutto quello che è interessante accade nell'ombra, davvero. Non si sa nulla della vera storia degli uomini.
Quel che è peggio è che uno si chiede come l'indomani troverà quel po' di forza per continuare a fare quel che ha fatto il giorno prima e poi già da tempo, dove troverà la forza per quelle iniziative sceme, quei mille progetti che non arrivano a niente, quei tentativi per uscire dalla necessità opprimente, tentativi che abortiscono sempre, e tutti per arrivare a convincersi una volta per tutte che il destino è invincibile, che bisogna sempre ricadere ai piedi della muraglia, ogni sera, sotto l'angoscia dell'indomani, sempre più precario, sempre più sordido.
Sempre avevo temuto di essere pressoché vuoto, di non avere insomma alcuna seria ragione per esistere. Adesso davanti ai fatti ero proprio certo del mio nulla individuale.
Siamo per natura così supeficiali, che soltanto le distrazioni ci possono impedire davvero di morire. Quanto a me, mi avvicinavo al cinema con un fervore disperato.
Gli nasconde tutto la vita agli uomini. Nel rumore che fanno loro stessi non sentono niente. Se ne fottono. E più la città è grande e più è alta e più se ne fottono. Ve lo dico io. Ho provato. Val mica la pena.
Bisognerà farla addormentare sul serio una sera o l'altra, la gente felice, e mentre dormiranno, ve lo dico io, farla finita una volta per tutte con loro e la loro felicità.
È questo l'esilio, l'estraneo, questa inesorabile osservazione dell'esistenza com'è davvero durante quelle poche ore lucide, eccezionali nella trama del tempo umano, in cui le abitudini del paese precedenti vi abbandonano, senza che le altre, le nuove, vi abbiano ancora rincoglionito a sufficienza.
La bellezza, è come l'alcool o il confort, ci si abitua, non ci si fa più attenzione.
Ma era troppo tardi per rifarmi una giovinezza. Ci credevo più! Si diventa rapidamente vecchi e in modo irrimediabile per giunta. Te ne accorgi dal modo che hai preso di amare le tue disgrazie tuo malgrado. La natura è più forte di te, ecco tutto.
Ci abbracciavamo. Ma io non l'abbracciavo bene, come avrei dovuto, in ginocchio a essere sinceri. Pensavo sempre un po' a un'altra cosa al tempo stesso, a non perdere tempo e tenerezza, come se volessi conservare tutto per un non so che di meraviglioso, di sublime, per più tardi, ma non per Molly, e non per questo.
Man mano che resti in un posto, le cose e le persone si bracano, marciscono.
Dopo di che, non ci furono che le nostre voci, tra noi, e tutto quello che hanno sempre l'aria di stare per dire, le voci, e non dicono mai.
Gli uomini ci tengono ai loro brutti ricordi, a tutte le loro disgrazie e non si può tirarli via di lì. Gli tiene occupata l'anima. Si vendicano dell'ingiustizia del loro presente accanendosi sull'avvenire nel fondo di se stessi a palle di merda.
È il breve intervallo in cui in qualche posto nuovo non ti conoscono ancora, che è la cosa più piacevole. Dopo, è la stessa cattiveria che ricomincia.
Vivere per vivere, che gattabuia!
Sei oppresso dalle faccende della tua vita intera quando vivi solo. Ne esci degradato.
La gran fatica dell'esistenza non è forse insomma nient'altro che questo gran darsi da fare per restare ragionevoli venti, quarant'anni, o più, per non essere semplicemente, profondamente se stessi, cioè immondi, atroci, assurdi.
Laggiù, lontano lontano, c'era il mare. Ma non avevo più niente da immaginare io sul mare adesso. Avevo altro da fare. Avevo un bel cercare di perdermi per non ritrovarmi più davanti la mia vita, la ritrovavo dappertutto semplicemente. Ritornavo su me stesso. Il mio stramballamento personale, era proprio finito. Sotto gli altri!... Il mondo era rinchiuso! In fondo com'eravamo arrivati noialtri!... Come alla fiera!... Avere dei dispiaceri non è tutto, bisognerebbe poter ricominciare la musica, andarne a cercare ancora di dispiaceri... Ma sotto gli altri!... È la giovinezza che uno rivorrebbe così senza averne l'aria... Senza imbarazzi!... Intanto per tirarla ancora avanti non ero più nemmeno pronto!... E tuttavia non ero nemmeno andato tanto lontano come Ribinson io nella vita!... Non ce l'avevo fatta in definitiva. Non avevo acquisito io una sola idea bella solida come quella che lui aveva avuto per farsi stendere. Un'idea più grossa ancora della mia grossa testa, più grossa di tutta la paura che c'era dentro, una bella idea, magnifica e comodissima per morire... Quante me ne servirebbero a me di vite perché mi facessi un'idea più forte di tutto il mondo? Era impossibile da dire! Era andata buca!
Mia madre camminava a testa bassa e con le spalle contratte come se piovesse sempre
Prima di imbattermi in queste teorie, credevo che l'amore coincidesse quasi sempre con il destino e una forma spaventosa di ignoranza — non sappiamo chi ameremo, né perché ne avremo bisogno. Ma quando penso alle somiglianze tra i miei genitori nei pomeriggi malinconici e rabbiosi della loro adolescenza, entrambi isolati, valuto la possibilità che l'incontro tra due persone non abbia a che fare far con la predestinazione quanto con una mappa biologica che si rivela mentre ci si innamora l'uno dell'altro, e si scopre che c'era un'intelligenza primitva che governava i nostri corpi e rilasciava particelle elementari nell'aria ancora prima di incontrarsi.
Capita di tornare dove tutto è iniziato e avvertire qualcosa di peggio che il senso di perdita: il dubbio, sottile e perverso, che in realtà quelle foto o quelle camicie di flanella non ci siano mai appartenute.
Non c'è un singolo atto di violenza nella mia vita che io riesca a ricordare senza ridere.
Londra ha perso la notte, i locali chiudono sempre prima. Anni fa gli autobus notturni erano pieni di gente timida, fragile e rivoltante. Erano tutti bellissimi mostri, con gli zigomi che sfondavano le guance, si scambiavano baci a bocca aperta e avevano una freddezza di fine secolo.
Da quando vivo a Londra queste decisioni istintive sono peggiorate. È come se avessi disimparato come si sta con gli altri. Invece di fermarmi ad assistere una persona cher sta male, non faccio che chiedermi quanto pagano di affitto i miei conoscenti, o che lavori fanno per restare qui, in un'ostinata resistenza che mi ottenebra e mi sta trasformando in una creatura diversa, di cui non sopporto la voce, il modo di gesticolare o di vestire. Cammino veloce per seminare i ninja androgini e salutisti che popolano le strade. Fuori sono tutti abbigliati con tenute sportive guerrigliere, indossano tute aderenti e scarpette da corsa come se si prestassero a saltare nel vuoto. Si son presi la notte, con il loro ottimismo ginnico e iodato, e tutte le persone mostruose e brutte hanno iniziato a sparire o a vivere in massa nelle stazioni: l'empatia l'ho disimparata, e ora ho una cittadinanza.
Quel che non c'è scritto nelle nostre tombe è la distanza da casa. Non siamo adolescenti partiti per cercare oro alla frontiera, e anche se ci ammaliamo di solitudine come facevano i pionieri del Vecchio West, nessuno dirà quali distanze abbiamo messo tra noi e il punto di partenza. Nessuno dirà di me o dei miei amici trasferiti in Inghilterra che siamo morti a duemila chilometri dal posto in cui siamo cresciuti, e questo perché non sono stati i venti di frontiera a spingerci, non abbiamo conquistato lande desolate e inventato pozzi necessari a portare l'acqua potabile, ma ci siamo stanziati in città già sovrappopolate, abbiamo lavorato in locali perimetrati dalle case in cui abbiamo dormito nell'umidità e nell'incomprensione dei proprietari, avamposti occidentali segnati sulla mappa alla ricerca dei nostri simili, e quale consolato o stazione di posta avrebbe potuto prendere nota delle nostre distanze alla vigilia di una specie di morte, se per tanti di noi quella partenza in fondo non era stata tanto necessaria né troppo difficile?
Il disastro è per forza di cose incrementale, un'accumulazione quotidiana, per la maggior parte di noi.
]]>Zami: a new spelling of my name2020-01-05T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780241351086
American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in America and the fact of American racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the nature of their ill will. Like so many other vital pieces of information in my childhood, I was supposed to know without being told. It always seemed like a very strange injunction coming from my mother, who looked so much like one of those people we were never supposed to trust. But something always warned me not to ask my mother why she wasn't white, and why Auntie Lillah and Auntie Etta weren't, even though they were all that same problematic color so different from my father and me, even from my sisters, who were somewhere in-between.
In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society - black or gay - I felt I didn't have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look "nice". To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn't realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.
The strongest and most lasting sense I had of Muriel after she was gone was of great sweetness hidden, and a vulnerability which surpassed even my own. Her gentle voice belying her dour appearance. I was intrigued by her combination of opposites, by her making no attempt to hide her weaknesses, nor even seeming to consider them shameful or suspect. Muriel radiated a quiet self-knowledge which I misstook for self-acceptance.
I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet. Like the smell of Muriel on my sweatshirt, and the straight black hairs caught in my glove. [...] When I recall the time Muriel and I spent together, I remember the assurances we gave each other, the sense of a shared niche out of the storm, and the wonder grounded in magic and hard work. I remember always the feeling that it could continue forever, this morning, this life. I remember the curl of Muriel's finger and her deep eyes and the smell of her buttery skin. The smell of basil. I remember the opennes of our loving that was a measurement against which I held up whatever was called love; and which I came to recorgnize as a legitimate demand between all lovers.
Muriel and I talked about love as a volonturay commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given.
There are certain verities which are always with us, which we come to depend upon. That the sun moves north in summer, that melted ice contracts, that the curved banana is sweeter. Afrekete taught me roots, new definitions of our women's bodies — definitions for which I had only been in training to learn before.
The window in our bedroom is open. You can see the moon if you lean out and crane your neck. The Greeks thought it was the only heavenly object similar to Earth. Plans and animals fifteen times stronger than our own inhabited it.
The moon will be fine, I think. No one's worrying about the moon.
Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism? A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. "You can't outrun a bear," the other whispers. "I just have to outrun you," he says.
Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.
Ben told me that in greek culture it has historically been considered both a duty and an honor to take care of strangers. You can see it with the villagers. The way they go out to rescue people in their boats or bring food to the exhausted ones on the beach. In ancient times, the gods used to test mortals by arriving on their doorsteps clothed in rags to see if they would be welcomed or turned away.
There is a tradition in Judaism that happiness and sorrow must be intermingled. On Passover, you are instructed to remove drops of wine before drinking it to lessen your pleasure. Each drop removed represents a tragedy that befell those who went before you.
Funny how when you're married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you're anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.
My husband is under the covers reading a long book about an ancient war. He turns out the light, arranges the blankes so we'll stay warm. The dog twiches her paws softly against the bed. Dreams of running, of other animals. I wake to the sound of gunshots. Walnuts on the roof, Ben says. The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.
Scrivo lentamente. Sforzandomi di far emergere la trama significativa di una vita da un insieme di fatti e di scelte, ho l'impressione di perdere, strada facendo, lo specifico profilo della figura di mio padre. L'ossatura tende a prendere il posto di tutto il resto, l'idea a correre da sola. Se al contrario lascio scivolare le immagini del ricordo, lo rivedo com'era. [...] Naturalmente, nessuna gioia di scrivere, in questa impresa in cui mi attengo più che posso a parole e frasi sentite per davvero, talvolta sottolineandole con dei corsivi. Non per indicare al lettore un doppio senso e offrirgli così il piacere di una complicità, che respingo invece in tutte le forme che può prendere, nostalgia, patetismo o derisione. Semplicemente perché queste parole e frasi dicono i limiti e il colore del mondo in cui visse mio padre, in cui anch'io ho vissuto.
Era la domenica che si facevano le foto, c'era più tempo ed eravamo vestiti meglio.
Decifrare questi dettagli è per me necessario, ora, mi si impone con necessità in quanto li ho rimossi sicura del fatto che non significassero nulla. Soltanto una memoria umiliata ha potuto far sì che ne serbassi delle tracce. Mi sono piegata al volere del mondo in cui vivo, un mondo che si sforza di far dimenticare i ricordi di quello che sta più in basso come se fosse qualcosa di cattivo gusto.
Con la lontananza avevo levigato l'immagine dei miei genitori, li avevo privati dei loro gesti e delle loro parole, due corpi gloriosi.
È nel modo in cui le persone si siedono e si annoiano nelle sale d'attesa, si rivolgono ai figli, salutano sui binari della stazione che ho cercato la figura di mio padre.
Il via Gorochavaja, in una di quelle grandi case la cui popolazione sarebbe sufficiente per un intero capoluogo di distretto, era a letto, un mattino, nel suo appartamento, Il’ja Il’ìč Oblomov. Costui era un uomo sui trentadue-trentatré anni, di media statura, di piacevole aspetto, con degli occhi grigio scuri e l’assenza di qualsivoglia idea precisa, di qualsivoglia capacità di concentrazione nei tratti del viso. Il pensiero vagava come un libero uccello sopra quel viso, svolazzava sugli occhi, si posava sulle labbra semiaperte, si nascondeva nelle pieghe della fronte poi spariva del tutto, e allora il viso brillava di un uguale candore di spensieratezza. Dal viso, la spensieratezza si trasferiva agli atteggiamenti del corpo, e perfino alle pieghe della vestaglia. [...] Il colorito del viso di Il’ja Il’ìč non era né rossastro, né olivastro, né si poteva dire pallido, ma indifferente, oppure così sembrava, forse per via del fatto che Oblomov era floscio e non per l'età: per mancanza di moto o per mancanza di aria, o, forse, dell'uno e dell'altra. In generale, il suo corpo, a giudicar dall'opaco, troppo bianco colore del collo, dalle piccole mani paffute, dalle morbide spalle, sembrava troppo molle, per un uomo.
Stare sdraiato, per Il'ja Il'ič non era né una necessità, come per un malato o per una persona che voglia dormire, né un caso, come per chi sia stanco, né un piacere, come per un fannullone: era la sua condizione normale.
Si smarriva in una congestione di piccole preoccupazioni.
"In dieci posti in un giorno: infelice!" pensò Oblomov. "E questa sarebbe vita?" scosse violentemente le spalle. "Ma dov'è l'uomo? In cosa si è frantumato e sfasciato? Certo, non è male fare un salto a teatro e innamorarsi di una qualche Lidija... è carina! In campagna, raccogliere i fiori, passeggiare, bene; ma dieci posti in un giorno: infelice!" concluse voltandosi sulla schiena e rallegrandosi di non avere pensieri e desideri così vacui, di non vagare ma di star coricato lì dove stava, conservando la sua dignità di uomo e la sua pace.
Si disponeva però sempre, si preparava sempre a cominciare a vivere, tracciava sempre, nella mente, il disegno del proprio futuro; ma a ogni anno che gli sfrecciava sopra la testa, doveva cambiare e cancellare qualcosa in questo disegno.
Quasi nessuno riusciva a tirarlo fuori di casa, ed egli, ogni giorno più fortemente e tenacemente, si aggrappava al suo appartamento.
"Quand'è che si vive?" si chiedeva ancora.
Ma a cosa servono, il grandioso e il selvaggio? Il mare, per esempio? Se ne può fare a meno. Fa venire solo malinconia: a guardarlo vien voglia di piangere.
Sai Andrej, che nella mia vita non è mai scoppiato nessun incendio né salvifico né distruttivo? La mia vita non è stata come un mattino, che si anima, lentamente, di colori e di fuochi, che si trasforma poi in giorno, come succede agli altri, e brucia forte, e tutto ribolle e ruota in un chiaro mezzogiorno e poi sempre più piano, sempre più pallido, e tutto, naturalmente e gradualmente, si spegne nella sera. No, la mia vita comincia con lo spegnimento. È strano, ma è così. Dal primo momento in cui ho avuto coscienza di me stesso, sentivo che già mi stavo spegnendo. Ho cominciato a spegnermi dopo, quando leggevo nei libri delle verità delle quali non sapevo cosa fare, nella vita, ho continuato a spegnermi con gli amici, quando ascoltavo giudizi, pettegolezzi, scimmiottature, chiacchiere fredde e cattive, vacuità, guardando all’amicizia sorretta da riunioni senza scopo, senza simpatia; mi sono spento e ho sperperato le mie forze con Mina, alla quale ho dato più della metà delle mie entrate, e mi immaginavo di amarla; mi sono spento nelle tristi e pigre passeggiate sul Nevskij prospekt, tra pellicce di procione e baveri di castoro, nelle serate, nei ricevimenti, dove mi accoglievano cordialmente, ero un partito passabile; mi sono spento e ho sprecato la mia vita e la mia intelligenza per delle bazzecole, passando dalla città alla dacia, dalla dacia a via Gorochovaja, prendendo la primavera per l’arrivo delle ostriche e delle aragoste, l’autunno e l’inverno per i giorni di ricevimento, l’estate per le passeggiate, la vita per una pigra e tranquilla sonnolenza, come gli altri… Anche l’amor proprio, in cosa l’ho impiegato? Nell’ordinare abiti a un sarto celebre? Per essere ricevuto in una casa celebre? Perché il principe P* mi desse la mano? Eppure l’amor proprio è il sale della vita. E dov’è sparito? O io non ho capito questa vita, o lei non serve a niente, e sarebbe stato meglio che io non sapessi niente, non vedessi niente, che nessuno mi facesse veder niente. Tu apparivi e scomparivi, come una cometa, brillante, rapida, e io dimenticavo tutte queste cose e mi spegnevo.
Da quel momento, lo sguardo insistente di Ol'ga non gli uscì più dalla testa. Invano si stendeva per il lungo sulla schiena, invano assumeva le posizioni più indolenti e tranquille... non riusciva a dormire, e fosse stato solo quello. La vestaglia gli sembrò ripugnante, Zachar stupido e insopportabile, e la polvere e le ragnatele intollerabili.
L'essere umano è ben strano. Più aumentava la sua felicità, più Ol'ga si faceva pensierosa e addirittura... timorosa. Si era messa a osservarsi con severità, e aveva notato che era turbata dalla tranquillità di questa vita, dal suo arrestarsi nei momenti di felicità. Aveva scosso violentemente dal proprio animo quella pensosità e aveva affrettato i suoi passi nella vita, aveva cercato febbrilmente il chiasso, il movimento, le occupazioni, aveva chiesto al marito di portarla in città, aveva provato ad osservare il mondo, la società, ma non era durata a lungo. La fretta del mondo l'aveva sfiorata appena, e era tornata nel suo angolino a scrollarsi di dosso una sensazione penosa, alla quale non era abituata, e di nuovo aveva ripreso le occupazioni minute della vita domestica. [...]
"Ma che cos'è?" pensava con orrore. "Com'è possibile che ci sia bisogno e si possa desiderare ancora qualcosa? Dove devo andare? Da nessuna parte! Non c'è nemmeno una strada... Davvero non c'è? Davvero ho descritto il cerchio della mia vita? Davvero è tutto qui... tutto?..." diceva la sua anima, e non diceva tutto. [...]
"Che cos'è?" si chiedeva disperata quando d'un tratto arrivavano la noia, l'indifferenza a tutto, in una meravigliosa serata che induceva alla contemplazione. [...]
"Delle volte ho come paura," continuò lei, "che tutto questo cambi, finisca... non lo so neanch'io. O soffro per un pensiero stupido: cosa succederà ancora?... Questa felicità... per tutta la vita..." diceva lei a voce sempre più bassa, vergognandosi di queste domande, "tutte queste gioie, questi dolori, la natura," sussurrava, "tutto mi spinge da qualche parte; non sono contenta di niente..."
"Ah! Ma è il prezzo del fuoco di Prometeo! Invece di sopportarla, dovresti amare questa tristezza e rispettare dubbi e domande: sono l'abbondanza, il lusso della vita, e si presentano sulle vette della felicità, quando non ci sono desideri volgari
La domanda che sua madre le faceva ogni mattina "Hai il fazzoletto?", conclude Müller nella sua prolusione a Stoccolma, "forse non riguardava il fazzoletto in sé, ma piuttosto la disperata solitudine dell'essere umano" e i modi che escogitiamo per porvi rimedio.
Le nostre cose, "non sono soltanto cose, recano tracce umane, sono il nostro prolungamento."
Avremo un telefono in ogni casa, poi sarà il tempo di averne uno per ogni persona, e poi vorremo cambiarlo ogni anno con il nuovo modello: più avanti ce ne servirà uno da mettere al polso. A quel punto il legame nostalgico fra noi e gli oggetti della nostra vita si ridurrà sempre di piú. Oggetti orfani si moltiplicheranno dentro i nostri cassetti, la nostra relazione con loro sarà sempre più vaga e momentanea.
Eppure le mail e le vecchie lettere di carta mantengono alcuni punti in comune molto importanti. Per esempio sono il luogo dell'indeterminatezza. Lo sono in maniere indifferenti ma con alcune analogie. Sono tecnologie asincrone e lo sono trionfalmente, da più punti di vista. Spediamo una mail (o una lettera) e il destinatario non lo sa. Noi stessi non sapremo se quella lettera (o quella mail) è stata ricevuta o se è stata letta. [...] L'asincronia della comunicazione è il luogo dell'eccitazione e dell'attesa, due piccole cose per le quali forse vale la pena di vivere. Se come scrive il poeta il viaggio è la meta, allora nella comunicazione fra umani il messaggio è il tempo fra quando la lettera viene spedita e quando la sua ricezione rompe indugi e incertezze.
Essere asincroni, nei contesti informativi, in quelli culturali e delle relazioni, è stato considerato per molto tempo un limite che doveva essere valicato. [...] Questo trionfo della velocità si è lasciato in scia una serie di oggetti morti e ha generato nuovi comportamenti. Ha brutalizzato le abitudini ma ci ha costretti a nuove strategie difensive affinché il nostro spazio personale di attesa e ragionamento, di elaborazione e cristallizzazione del pensiero, potesse ugualmente mantenersi.
"E vi dirò pure, don Pietrino, se, come tante volte è avvenuto, questa classe dovesse scomparire, se ne costituirebbe subito un'altra equivalente, con gli stessi pregi e gli stessi difetti: non sarebbe più basata sul sangue forse, ma che so io... sull'anzianità di presenza in un luogo o su pretesa miglior conoscenza di qualche testo presunto sacro."
Vedi: tu, Bendicò, sei un po' come loro, come le stelle: felicemente incomprensibile, incapace di produrre angoscia.
Quando la famiglia si fu messa in carrozza (la guazza aveva reso umidi i cuscini) Don Fabrizio disse che sarebbe tornato a casa a piedi; un po’ di fresco gli avrebbe fatto bene, aveva un’ombra di mal di capo. La verità era che voleva attingere un po’ di conforto guardando le stelle. Ve n’era ancora qualcuna proprio su, allo zenith. Come sempre il vederle lo rianimò; erano lontane, onnipotenti e nello stesso tempo tanto docili ai suoi calcoli; proprio il contrario degli uomini, troppo vicini sempre, deboli e pur tanto riottosi. Nelle strade vi era di già un po’ di movimento: qualche carro con cumuli d’immondizia alti quattro volte l’asinello grigio che li trascinava. Un lungo barroccio scoperto portava accatastati i buoi uccisi poco prima al macello, già fatti a quarti e che esibivano i loro meccanismi più intimi con l’impudicizia della morte. A intervalli una qualche goccia rossa e densa cadeva sul selciato. Da una viuzza traversa intravide la parte orientale del cielo, al disopra del mare. Venere stava lì, avvolta nel suo turbante di vapori autunnali. Essa era sempre fedele, aspettava sempre Don Fabrizio alle sue uscite mattutine, a Donnafugata prima della caccia, adesso dopo il ballo. Don Fabrizio sospirò. Quando si sarebbe decisa a dargli un appuntamento meno effimero, lontano dai torsoli e dal sangue, nella propria regione di perenne certezza?”
Don Fabrizio quella sensazione la conosceva da sempre. Erano decenni che sentiva come il fluido vitale, la facoltà di esistere, la vita insomma, e forse anche la volontà di continuare a vivere andassero uscendo da lui lentamente ma continuamente come i granellini che si affollano e sfilano ad uno ad uno, senza fretta e senza soste, dinanzi allo stretto orifizio di un orologio a sabbia. In alcuni momenti d'intensa attività, di grande attenzione questo sentimento di continuo abbandono scompariva per ripresentarsi impassibile alla più breve occasione di silenzio o d'introspezione, come un ronzio continuo all'orecchio, come il battito di una pendola s'impongono quando tutto il resto tace; e ci rendono sicuri, allora, che essi sono sempre stati lì vigili anche quando non li udivamo.
In tutti gli altri momenti gli bastava sempre un minimo di attenzione per avvertire il fruscio dei granelli di sabbia che sgusciavano via lievi, degli attimi di tempo che evadevano dalla sua vita e lo lasciavano per sempre; la sensazione del resto non era, prima, legata ad alcun malessere, anzi questa impercettibile perdita di vitalità era la prova, la condizione per così dire, della sensazione di vita; e per lui, avvezzo a scrutare spazi esteriori illimitati, a indagare vastissimi abissi interiori essa non era per nulla sgradevole: era quella di un continuo, minutissimo sgretolamento della personalità congiunto però al presagio vago del riedificardi altrove di una individualità meno cosciente ma più larga: quei granelli di sabbia non andavano perduti, scomparivano sì ma si accumulavano chissà dove per cementare una mole più duratura. Mole, però, aveva riflettuto, non era la parola esatta, pesante come era; e granelli di sabbia, d’altronde, neppure. Erano più come delle particelle di vapor acqueo che esalassero da uno stagno costretto, per andar su nel cielo a formare le grandi nubi leggere e libere. Talvolta era sorpreso che il serbatoio vitale potesse ancora contenere qualcosa dopo tanti anni di perdite. “Neppure se fosse grande come una piramide.” Tal'altra volta, più spesso, si era inorgoglito di esser quasi solo ad avvertire questa fuga continua, mentre attorno a lui nessuno sembrava sentire lo stesso; e ne aveva tratto motivo di disprezzo per gli altri, come il soldato anziano disprezza il coscritto che si illude che le pallottole ronzanti intorno siano dei mosconi innocui. Queste son cose che, non si sa poi perché, non si confessano; si lascia che gli altri le intuiscano e nessuno intorno a lui le aveva intuite mai, nessuna delle figlie che sognavano un'oltretomba identico a questa vita, completo di tutto, di magistratura, cuochi e conventi; non Stella che, divorata dalla cancrena del diabete, si era tuttavia aggrappata meschinamente a questa esistenza di pene. Forse solo Tancredi aveva per un attimo compreso, quando gli aveva detto con la sua ritrosa ironia: “Tu, zione, corteggi la morte.” Adesso il corteggiamento era finito: la bella aveva detto il suo “sì,” la fuga decisa, lo scompartimento del treno riservato.
Nell'ombra che saliva si provò a contare per quanto tempo avesse in realtà vissuto. Il suo cervello non dipanava più il semplice calcolo: tre mesi, venti giorni, un totale di sei mesi, sei per otto ottantaquattro... quarantottomila... 840.000. Si riprese. "Ho settantatré anni, all'ingrosso ne avrò vissuto, veramente vissuto, un totale di due... tre al massimo." E i dolori, la noia, quanti erano stati? Inutile sforzarsi a contare tutto il resto: settant'anni.
]]>Felici i felici2020-08-20T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788845931888
Gli oggetti si accumulano e diventano inutili. E noi uguale. Ascolto la pioggia che è un po' meno forte. Anche il vento. Inclino lo schermo del portatile. Tutto ciò che abbiamo sotto gli occhi è già passato. Non sono triste. Le cose sono fatte per svanire. Me ne andrò senza storia. Non troveranno né bara né ossa. Tutto continuerà come sempre. Tutto se ne andrà allegramente nella corrente.
Un uomo è un uomo. Non esistono uomini sposati, uomini proibiti. Non esistono. Quando incontri qualcuno, mica ti interessa il suo stato civile. Né la situazione sentimentale. I sentimenti sono mutevoli e mortali. Come tutte le cose del mondo. Gli aninmali muoiono. Le piante. Da un anno all'altro i corsi d'acqua non sono più gli stessi. Niente dura. Alla gente piace credere il contrario. Tutti passano la vita a rimettere insieme i pezzi e lo chiamano matrimonio, fedeltà o cose del genere. Io non mi preoccupo più di queste sciocchezze.
]]>Il deserto dei tartari2020-08-31T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788804668046
Dietro quel fiume — dirà la gente — ancora dieci chilometri e sarai arrivato. Invece non è mai finita, le giornate si fanno sempre più brevi, i compagni di viaggio più radi, alle finestre stanno apatiche figure pallide che scuotono il capo. Fino a che Drogo rimarrà completamente solo e all'orizzonte ecco la striscia di uno smisurato mare immobile, colore di piombo. Oramai sarà stanco, le case lungo la via avranno quasi tutte le finestre chiuse e le rare persone visibili gli risponderanno con un gesto sconsolato: il buono era indietro, molto indietro e lui ci è passato davanti senza sapere.
Il tempo intanto correva, il suo battito silenzioso scandisce sempre più precipitoso la vita, non ci si può fermare neanche un attimo, neppure per un'occhiata indietro. "Ferma, ferma!" si vorrebbe gridare, ma si capisce ch'è inutile. Tutto quanto fugge via, gli uomini, le stagioni, le nubi; e non serve aggrapparsi alle pietre, resistere in cima a qualche scoglio, le dita stanche si aprono, le braccia si afflosciano inerti, si è trascinati ancora nel fiume, che pare lento e non si ferma mai.
Di giorno in giorno Drogo sentiva aumentare questa misteriosa rovina, e invano tentava di trattenerla. Nella vita uniforme della Fortezza gli mancavano punti di riferimento e le ore gli sfuggivano di sotto prima che lui riuscisse a contarle.
C'era poi la speranza segreta per cui Drogo sperperava la migliore parte della vita. Per alimentarla sacrificava leggermente mesi su mesi, e mai bastava. L'inverno, il lunghissimo inverno della Fortezza, non fu che una specie di acconto. Terminato l'inverno, Drogo ancora aspettava.
Proprio in quel tempo Drogo si accorse come gli uomini, per quanto possano volersi bene, rimangano sempre lontani; che se uno soffre, il dolore è completamente suo, nessun altro può prenderne su di sé una minima parte; che se uno soffre, gli altri per questo non sentono male, anche se l'amore è grande, e questo provoca la solitudine della vita.
]]>La boutique del mistero2020-10-19T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788804668084
Vorrei con te passeggiare, un giorno di primavera, col cielo di color grigio e ancora qualche vecchia foglia dell'anno prima trascinata per le strade dal vento, nei quartieri della periferia; e che fosse domenica. In tali contrade sorgono spesso pensieri malinconici e grandi; e in date ore vaga la poesia, congiungendo i cuori di quelli che si vogliono bene. Nascono inoltre speranze che non si sanno dire, favorite dagli orizzonti sterminati dietro le case, dai treni fuggenti, dalle nuvole del settentrione. Ci terremo semplicemente per mano e andremo con passo leggero, dicendo cose insensate, stupide e care. Fino a che si accenderanno i lampioni e dai casamenti squallidi usciranno le storie sinistre della città, le avventure, i vagheggianti romanzi. E allora noi taceremo, sempre tenendoci per mano, poiché le anime si parleranno senza parola. Ma tu — adesso mi ricordo — mai mi dicesti cose insensate, stupide e care. Né puoi quindi amare quelle domeniche che dico, né l'anima tua sa parlare alla mia in silenzio, né riconosci all'ora giusta l'incantesimo delle città, né le speranze che scendono dal settentrione. Tu preferisci le luci, la folla, gli uomini che ti guardano, le vie dove dicono si possa incontrar la fortuna. Tu sei diversa da me e se venissi quel giorno a passeggiare, ti lamenteresti di essere stanca; solo questo e nient'altro.
Ma tu — adesso ci penso — sei troppo lontana, centinaia e centinaia di chilometri difficili a valicare. Tu sei dentro a una vita che ignoro, e gli altri uomini ti sono accanto, a cui probabilmente te sorridi, come a me nei tempi passati. Ed è bastato poco tempo perché ti dimenticassi di me. Probabilmente non riesci più a ricordare il mio nome. Io sono oramai uscito da te, confuso fra le innumerevoli ombre. Eppure non so pensare che a te, e mi piace dirti queste cose.
“Facevo due tre passi nel corridoio e mi raggiungeva la temuta voce: "Dino". Tornavo indietro. "Ci sei a colazione?" "Sì." "E a pranzo?"
"E a pranzo?" Dio mio, quanto innocente e grande e nello stesso tempo piccolo desiderio c'era nella domanda. Non chiedeva, non pretendeva, domandava soltanto un'informazione.
Ma io avevo appuntamenti cretini, avevo ragazze che non mi volevano bene e in fondo se ne fregavano altamente di me, e l'idea di tornare alle otto e mezzo nella casa triste, avvelenata dalla vecchiaia e dalla malattia, già contaminata dalla morte, mi repelleva addirittura, perché non si deve avere il coraggio di confessare queste orribili cose quando sono vere? "Non so" allora rispondevo "telefonerò". E io sapevo che avrei telefonato di no. E lei subito capiva che io avrei telefonato di no e nel suo "Ciao" c'era uno sconforto grandissimo. Ma io ero il figlio, egoista come sanno esserlo soltanto i figli.”
]]>La figlia del capitano2020-10-21T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788806228637]]>Atlante occidentale2020-10-25T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9788806199449
Ciò che pensava come a una posizione era in realtà l'adeguamento a tutto quanto.
Pensava alle città in cui era vissuto, alle città che aveva immaginato e raccontato; a come quelle città avessero avuto ciascuna un proprio carattere che si era sforzato di sentire, a come invece adesso fossero più o meno tutte uguali e solo il carattere delle persone gli sembrasse mutevole, e importante.
Ho imparato a usare gli oggetti, a portare una barca, a guidare una macchina, a pilotare un aeroplano; per ogni cosa c'erano manuali, libri in apparenza destinati alla mano più che all'anima, ma soltanto in apparenza, perché se posso dubitare dell'intenzione dei romanzi che ho scritto so per certo che il fine di un manuale è uno solo, accrescere la felicità del genere umano. Nei manuali c'erano i nomi della natura, i nomi delle cose, la descrizione del loro funzionamento, ciò che bisognava fare o come si doveva stare perché quella determinata cosa funzionasse. Ogni manuale era per me un libro di galateo applicato, un romanzo di formazione.
Le cose stanno cambiando, sono cambiate. Non nel senso generico che si dà a questa frase. Le cose stanno scomparendo. Quelle che arrivano, o arriveranno, ho paura che non potrò piú sentirle. Ho paura che potrò solo usarle.
Il succedersi degli oggetti e dei modelli era un buon modo di sentire il tempo, e di ricordarlo.
Forse ci sono delle quantità all'inizio che poi uno esaurisce via via: che so, una certa quantità di sonno, e quando l'hai dormita tutta poi basta. O una quantità di chilometri che puoi farti a piedi in tutta la tua vita. O una quantità di frutti di mare. O una quantità di attesa: anche di queste ce n'é sempre di meno, finché non ce n'è piú.
Se parlava o sorrideva Brahe poteva vedere lo zigomo perfettamente rotondo, il tratto delle palpebre nettissime sopra e sotto, le linee delle labbra e le curve dell'orecchio attorno al quale giravano i capelli corti, e pensó che se tutto questo era così bello da quella distanza sarebbe stato insostenibile guardarlo ancora più da vicino, come si guarda quando si è cosí vicini che bisogna chiudere un occhio per mettere a fuoco.
Di tutte le cose che col passare degli anni si irrigidiscono, e bisogna tenere in esercizio, Epstein aveva curato la precisione. Non la pignoleria, che è un restringimento del campo visivo, né la perfezione che ne è l'allargamento illimitato, ma la precisione, come si allena un muscolo. Forse perché sentiva che la precisione conserva lo stupore e che invecchiare significa non tanto perdere la curiosità, quanto perdere la capacità di incanto e di stupore ragionevole. La sua precisione non era esclusiva, tollerava negli altri anche l'esagerazione e l'imprecisione, purché servissero ad afferrare qualcosa; solo, la precisione era per lui il modo più naturale di avvicinarsi allo stupore, e di preservarlo.
Poi aveva capito che le cose più importanti avvengono nella distrazione, non nella concentrazione, e aveva imparato la necessità di distrarsi.
Ci sono delle persone che conservano qualcosa di animale: il taglio degli occhi, il modo di camminare, come si voltano, o sorridono, o piegano la testa. Forse perché seguono dei percorsi tutti loro, paralleli a quelli degli altri.
Fu un bacio molto lungo e molto dolce, come sono i baci che uno si è aspettato per tutto un pomeriggio, e già non ci spera più.
A lui era sembrato che vedere significasse solo spostare un po' piú in là la soglia del non visibile, ricostruirla con lo stesso battito di ciglia con cui la si abbatteva, gli era sembrato che una macchina cosí grande, e una geometria cosí raffinata, e una matematica tanto complessa che il vero problema era come rinormalizzare continuamente l'infinito.
Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. [...] Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work of art than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The main tradition of criticism in all the arts, appealing to such apparently dissimilar criteria as verisimilitude and moral correctness, in effect treats the work of art as a statement being made in form of a work of art. To treat works of art in this fashion is not wholly irrelevant. But it is, obviously, putting art to use. [...] A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or a commentary on the world.
The knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judment) in itself.
The moral pleasure peculiar to art is not the pleasure of approving of acts or disapproving of them. The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. [...] Only when works of art are reduced to statements which propose a specific content, and when morality is identified with a particular morality — only then can a work of art be thought to undermine morality.
Not many people are capable of adjusting their perceptive apparatus to the pane and the transparency that is the work of art. Instead, they look right through it and revel in the human reality with which the work deals.
For the sense in which a work of art has no content is no different from the sense in which the world has no content. Both are. Both need no justification; nor could the possibly have any. [...] That is to say, the world (all there is) cannot, ultimately, be justified. Justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another — not when we consider all there is.
A work of art is a kind of showing or recording or witnessing which gives palpable form to consciousness; its object is to make something singular explicit. [...] What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize.
Here is where the modern cult of love enters: it is the main way in which we test ourselves for strength of feeling, and find ourselves deficient. [...] The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering. [...] The sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion.
Moral beauty in art — like physical beauty in a person — is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
Action is not Camus' first concern. The ability to act, or to refrain from acting, is secondary to the ability or inability to feel. [...] Camus' life and work are not so much about morality as they are about the pathos of moral positions.
Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.
The pupil is thereby schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of social roles are melted into schooling. [...] Universal schooling was meant to detach role assignment from personal life history: it was meant to give everybody an equal chance to any office.[...] However, instead of equalizing chances, the school system has monopolized their distribution.
A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.
School is inefficient in skill instruction especially because it is curricular. In most schools a program which is meant to improve one skill is chained always to another irrelevant task.
A deschooled society implies a new approach to incidental or informal education. Contemporary society is the result of conscious designs, and educational opportunities must be designed into them. Our reliance on specialized, full-time instruction through school will now decrease, and we must find more ways to learn and teach: the educational quality of all institutions must increase again.
Everywhere, all children know that they were given a chance, albeit an unequal one, in an obligatory lottery, and the presumed equality of the international standard now compounds their original poverty with the self-inflicted discrimination accepted by the dropout. They have been schooled to the belief in rising expectations and can now rationalize their growing frustration outside school by accepting their rejection from scholastic grace. They are excluded from Heaven because, once baptized, they did not go to church.
At the opposite extreme of the spectrum lie institutions distinguished by spontaneous use-the "convivial" institutions. Telephone link-ups, subway lines, mail routes, public markets and exchanges do not require hard or soft sells to induce their clients to use them. Sewage systems, drinking water, parks, and sidewalks are institutions men use without having to be institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so.
The highway system is a network for locomotion across relatively large distances. As a network, it appears to belong on the left of the institutional spectrum. But here we must make a distinction which will clarify both the nature of highways and the nature of true public utilities. Genuinely all-purpose roads are true public utilities. Superhighways are private preserves, the cost of which has been partially foisted upon the public.
The value of a man's schooling is a function of the number of years he has completed and of the costliness of the schools he has attended.
The man-made environment has become as inscrutable as nature is for the primitive.
A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well. But everything is different IRL. For one thing, I am not as quick on my feet. There is no time to consider my words or to craft a clever response in iOS Notes. There is also the fact of body heath. The inarticulable parts of being close to a man, the sweet, feral thing underneath their cologne, the way it sometimes feels as if there are no whites to their eyes. A man's profound, adrenal, craziness, the tenuousness of his restraint. I feel it on me and inside me, like I am being possessed. When we talked online, we both did some work to fill in the blanks. We filled them in optimistically, with the kind of yearning that brightens and distorts. We had elaborate, hypothetical dinners and we talked about the doctor's appointments we were afraid to make. Now there are no blanks, and when he rubs sunblock on my back, it is both too little and too much.
He frowns, and I realize I have seen this one before, that after a few hours his facial expressions are already becoming familiar to me. When I think of how we will only move forward from here, how we will never return to the relative anonymity of the internet, I want to fold myself into a ball. I hate the idea that I have repeated an action, that he has looked at me, discerned a pattern, and silently decided whether it is something he can bear to see again.
When it's almost 5:00 am, I have a passable replication of Eric's face. The slope of his nose in the soft red light of the dash. I rinse my brushes and watch dawn come in its smoky metropolitan form. Somewhere in Essex County, Eric is in bed with his wife. It's not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It's that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.
My roommate and I have been supporting a family of mice for six months. We have gone through a series of traps and yelled at each other in Home Depot about what consistutes a humane death. My roommate wanted to bomb the place.
Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and shallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve.
I have come to the part of the night where I am incapable of any uppercase emotion, and every circuit responsible for my cellular regeneration has begun to smoke.
I think of my parents, not because I miss them, but because sometimes you see a black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit. You know that they are masters of the double consciousness, of the discreet management of fury under the tight surveillance and casual violence of the outside world. You know that they said thank you as they bled, and that despite the roaches and the instant oatmeal and the bruise on your face, you are still luckier than they have ever been, such that losing a bottom-tier job in publishing is not only ridiculous but offensive.
By the time I feel able to contribute to our conversation, it becomes obvious that it is not a conversation. It becomes obvious that he does not intend to acknowledge punching me in the face or the terrible, revelatory night I spent at his home. The texts come intermittently and without any prompting, though Eric usually sends them at around noon and midnight, which tells me that I occur to him during lunch and perhaps while he is still in bed. In between these texts, I want to ask him what he's eating. I want to ask him why he is awake. But then I worry he'll remember I'm on the other end and the texts will stop. This is the way it was when our relationship only existed online. We told each other things so awful that by necessity we adopted the posture of speaking in jest, though we had gone through the trouble to create a language, and the effort of this alone betrayed our seriousness. And then we met.
My reliance on the city's density, which I have spent so much time hating but proves to be the last barrier between me and some inconceivable bosslevel of concentrated loneliness.
"Imagine living life so carefully that there are no signs you lived at all," she says. "I thought I was going to be a surgeon. Then my first year of med school, we got our first cadavers, and there was so much data inside. You can be sure a patient will lie about how much they drink or how much they smoke, but with a cadaver, all the information is there." She lights another cigarette and sighs. "It's like walking through a stranger's house and touching all their things."
]]>The Crying of Lot 492021-06-29T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/0099532611
"'I'll tell you what I know then,' he decided. 'The pin I'm wearing means I'm a member of the IA. That's Innamorati Anonymous. An innamorato is somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all.'"
"'I came, she said, 'hoping you could talk me out of a fantay!' 'Cherish it!' cried Hilarius, fiercely. 'What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.'"
He conceded on a piece of paper, I cannot justify. Considering his entire life, he realised that he had mismanaged everything — everything.
A man is born to be orphaned, and to leave oprhans after him, but a chair like that chair, if he can afford it, is a great comfort.
These things either matter or they do not matter. It depends upon the universe, what it is. These acute memories are probably symptoms of disorder. To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
"Yes, I was stupid — a blockhead. But that was one of the problems I was working on, you see, that people can be free now but the freedom doesn't have any content. It's like a howling emptiness.
Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression "the fall into the quotidian." When did this occur? Where were we standing when it happened?
Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or to read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday.
Later that day she was introduced to the concept of walking just for pleasure.
Her morning mantra in the bathroom mirror. I am highly presentable, likeable, clubbable, relatable, promotable and successful.
You English people, I want to tell those dirty-lookers, should ask me how to shop in this country because we immigrants are much cleverer at it than you, we refuse to pay ridicolous amounts for spices simply because they are in pretty little glass jars with a 'scattering of cardamom pods' or 'fine strands of saffron' on the label. what is scattering? tell me now? or 'a generous pinch'? is it a pound or a kilo?
Penelope came to the conclusion that marrying someone when you're in love with them was perhaps not such a good idea, better to wait a few years (ten, twenty, thirty, never?) to see if you're still compatible after the passion has subsided and reality set in.
She spent the first few hours in her newly independent republic staring out of a window that framed a small square of pure sky. all hers
so Bibi had been born a man and was now a woman, Megan had wondered, daren't ask, she might bite her head off. and Megan was a woman who wondered if she should have been born a man, who was attracted to a woman who'd once been a man, who was now saying gender was full of misguided expectations anyway, even though she had herself transitioned from male to female. this was such head fuckery.
Everything changed, Ma, once me and my Hattie found each other, it was like I came out of the darkness and into the light and could love her as I should. I wish you'd seen me spoil her, Ma, let her get her own way with everything because I couldn't say no to anything she wanted, until Joseph stepped in and said I was ruining her. I wish you'd seen how Joseph and Hattie adored each other, how he made no concessions for her being a girl, how she followed him around copying everything he did. I wish you'd seen Hattie grow strong, tough and tall, Ma, see her learn to plough, sow, thresh, drive bales of hay on the tractor from the fields to the barns. I wish you were around to be her grandma, to tell her what it was like for you growing up, and stories about me from when I was too young to remember. I wish you'd not died so young, Ma, seen how well I was looked after in the home, how I learned to walk in shoes, had clean water and fresh food and learned many things.
In any case, neither his blackness nor his gayness are the result of conscious political decisions, the former is genetically determined, the latter psychically and psychologically pre-disposed. Where they will remain, not as intellectual or activist preoccupations but rather as footnotes.
On and on I experienced gapin periods of time when I was flattened by a sense of doom.
Sometimes I think of asking for it back. But I can't bring myself: 'Can I have my book back please?' No, I am just quite unable to say that. I can buy it again of course, and one day that's what I'll do I expect. And as I go along reading it again I'll underline sentences here and there once more, but they won't be the same sentences — it's very likely that the sentences I'll underline in future will be different from the sentences I underlined in the past, when I was in Tangier - you don't ever step into the same book twice after all.
You don't believe in shelves, do you?
Poetry rips right through you, makes shit of you, and a man can be made shit of and go on living because no one really minds, not even the man. The man likes it in fact, likes to be made shit of so that he can sit there and drink his head off and declaim one epithetical thing after another and all the other interminably taciturn men believe he is an exceptional man, a man taking a hit for them all, a hero really, a ramshackle hero they'd love to raise up upon their shot-to-fuck shoulders of else roll about in the muck with, for wasn't he a down-to-earth sort of a fellow after all? But it's dreadful to see a woman who's been made shit of.
Many of the books I read by women were written when this or that woman was sad or was reflecting upon a time when she had felt sad and when I say sad I'm being coy of course, but what else can I say? Adrift? At odds? Displaced? Out of sorts? Out of her mind? At her witsend? From another planet? Anna Kavan, for example, she doesn't want the day, she's not interested in all of that, because for one thing she went to school during the day and that wasn't where she belonged, there's too much reality in the day for another thing, everything is visible, on and on, for miles in every direction, and hardly any of it is especially engaging.
One is relentlessly overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time.
I probably went back to my B&B and on up the stairs all cosy and lay on the bed with a cigarette after all that disgruntlement with Billy. And that was all there was to it me on the bed no texting no emailing no one knew where I was it wasn't as if I told my parents or my housemates, perhaps I'd told Dale. Probably I had but quite often people didn't know where you were what you were doing nor how you felt about it either. You just had to lie there oftentimes, that was all there was to it. And I loved that feeling of no one knowing. And went on loving it. Treasuring it. I treasured it really. Privacy. Secrets. But it became more and more difficult to get that not-knowing and the deeply glamorous feeling that came with it and now it doesn't exist at all the outcast minutes of the day gently claw at you, over here, over here, and it's harder to know where you are or what you're doing and how you really feel about any of it. One's on tenterhooks nearly all the time and there's nothing remotely glamorous about tenterhooks.
Well, it varies from day to day. Sometimes I'm just waiting for a telephone call or the next meal, or to pick my children up, but when I think about it and pose the question to myself I imagine that in time I would've become a different person and the world around me will be different too. There is this constant desire to break out of one's own skin and into another reality. Sometimes you see paintings of rocks or ocean, or wilderness, and you think not only will I go there but I will partake of a whole new kind of experience. I will be born again through those rocks or in that ocean and the I who now suffers and laughs will do it in a different and possibly richer way.
]]>Seize the day2022-04-04T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780141184852
He was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage: it is harder to find out how he feels.
'Oh, you think I'm trying to amuse you,' said Tamkin. 'That's because you aren't familiar with my outlook. I deal in facts. Facts are always sensational. I'll say that a second time. Facts always! are sensational.'
People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don't see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life.
Bringing people in the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real — the here-and-now. Sieze the day.
Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood.
Nature only knows one thing, and that’s the present. Present, present, eternal present, like a big, huge, giant wave – colossal, bright and beautiful, full of life and death, climbing into the sky, standing in the seas. You must go along with the actual, the Here-and-Now, the glory -
Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.
“Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth—” She hesitated. Port laughed abruptly. “And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then’s when you’re conscious of the bitter taste.” “But I’m always conscious of the unpleasant taste and of the end approaching,” she said.
“Whoever invented the concept of fairness, anyway? Isn't everything easier if you simply get rid of the idea of justice altogether? You think the quantity of pleasure, the degree of suffering is constant among all men?”
He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.
Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Probably twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Before her eyes was the violent blu sky — nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralysed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above.
]]>Vite brevi di idioti2022-08-15T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/8823516021
I re magi viaggiavano sopra dei razzi.
Diceva che Engels e Marx se li erano inventati i marxisti e non erano a suo avviso mai esistiti; si capiva dei loro ritratti, perché avevano le barbe finte, probabilmente affittate.
Il dottor Prini è convinto che alla base del caso c'è l'ulcera, in una forma ereditaria che dà il cretinismo parziale lipomnemonico (cioè con vuoti della memoria). Dice che spesso in famiglia capita di non riconoscersi, senza che questo traspaia. Alla base di tutto c'è il fritto, che per l'organismo è un veleno.
In seguito il dottor Dialisi accentuò ulteriormente le persecuzioni: aizzava i cani per farsi mordere i piedi; se li faceva pestare dalle scolaresche o dove c'erano resse, e un piede gli fu trafitto da una punta d'ombrello, senza che lui protestasse. Li paragonava al costato di Nostro Signore, ma senza intenzioni blasfeme; infatti dei piedi non aveva una bassa opinione, come si ha comunemente, ma rappresentavano per lui il centro della sua vita morale. Gli si erano comunque formati due ascessi talmente estesi e profondi che lo portarono rapidamente alla tomba.
"Ho sempre pensato che bastava far bene il mio lavoro e non improvvisare nulla. E ora scopro che avrei potuto fare un mucchio d'altre cose: giocare a scacchi, essere gentile con la gente, ascoltare musica, andare al teatro." "Nessuno può vivere in tutte le direzioni, Quangel. La vita è così ricca. Lei sarebbe sminuzzato. Ha fatto il suo lavoro e si è sempre sentito un uomo completo. Quando era ancora fuori, era contento di sé."
"Perlomeno lei ha resistito al male. Non è diventato malvagio insieme con gli altri. Lei ed io e i molti che sono qui in questa casa e molti, moltissimi in altre case simili e le decine di migliaia nei campi di concentramento continuano a resistere ancora oggi, domani..." "Sì, e poi ci ammazzeranno, e a cosa sarà servita la nostra resistenza?" "A noi sarà servita molto perché sentiremo di esserci comportati fino alla fine in modo decente. E più ancora sarà servita al popolo che sarà salvato per amore dei giusti, come sta scritto nella Bibbia. Vede, Quangel, sarebbe sttao naturalmente mille volte meglio se avessimo avuto un uomo che ci avesse detto: dovete agire così e così, questo o quello è il nostro piano. Ma se ci fosse stato un uomo simile in Germania, non avremmo mai avuto il 1933. Così abbiamo dovuto agire ognuno per conto suo, e siamo stati presi uno per uno, e ognuno di noi morirà solo. Ma non per questo siamo soli, Quangel non per questo moriamo inutilmente. A questo mondo nulla accade inutilmente, e poiché combattiamo per la giustizia contro la forza bruta, saremo noi i vincitori, alla fine."
I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing — being right — gets you nothing in this world. It’s the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time. Fuck Sasha, I thought. I'm fully aware that Sasha emerges from these descriptions as sympathetic, whereas I come off as a moralizing prig. I was a moralizing prig, and not just toward my cousin. My father, who treated Sasha as a daughter and whom I saw as her enabler; my mother, whose romantic adventures since my parents' divorce I found sickening; my younger brothers, Ames and Alfred, both of whom I'd deemed "lost" before they turned twenty-five — no one escaped the roving, lacerating beam of my judgment. I can access that beam even now, decades later: a font of outraged impatience with other people's flaws. How had the human species managed to survive for millennia? How had we built civilizations and invented antibiotics when practically no one, other than Trudy and me, seemed capable of sucking it up and just getting things done?
But I hadn’t counted on the circularity of life: the way it delivers us, with age, back to the beginning.
Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.
Knowledge is power, so they say, and yet any counter will tell you that merely possessing data, in itself, is neither useful nor predictive. Does it help me to know that, in the roughly 5.224 months they have been dating, M and Marc have spent the night approximately one out of three, or 53.07, nights?
The random walk of a drunk is of geometric interest, but it can’t predict where he’ll stagger next.
A bright moon can astonish, no matter how many times you have seen it.
But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.
]]>Song of Solomon2023-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/1784876453
Riding backward made him uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going — just where he had been.
It was becoming a habit — this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.
Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ‘em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ‘em to. No. And you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and every day. There’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ’29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.
And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.
She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?
"You don't listen to people. Your ear is on your head, but it's not connected to your brain. I said she killed herself rather than do the work I'd been doing all my life!" Circe stood up, and the dogs too. "Do you hear me? She saw the work I did all her days and died, you hear me, died rather than live like me. Now, what do you suppose she thought I was! If the way I lived and the work I did was so hateful to her she killed herself to keep from having to do it, and you think I stay on here because I loved her, then you have about as much sense as a fart!"
It sounded old. Deserve. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn't deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment from others. He'd told Guitar that he didn't "deserve" his family's dependence, hatred, or whatever. That he didn't even "deserve" to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him. Nor did he "deserve" Hagar's vengeance. But why shouldn't his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who? And if a stranger could try to kill him, surely Hagar, who knew him and whom he'd thrown away like a wad of chewing gum after the flavor was gone – she had a right to try to kill him too. Apparently he though he deserved only to be loved — from a distance, though — and given what he wanted. And in return he would be...what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.”
You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.
You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Hagar, don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that
I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
]]>Seeing Like a State2023-03-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/0300246757
Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality.
There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound.
The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observations. [...] The more static, standardized, and uniform a population or social space is, the more legible it is, and the more amendable it is to the techniques of state officials. [...] Categories that may have begun as the artificial inventions of cadastral surveyors, census takers, judges, or police officers can end by becoming categories that organize people's daily experience precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that structure that experience. [...] The categories used by the state agents are not merely means to make their environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance.
How a city develops is something like how a language evolves. A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. [...] Like planned cities, planned languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example; technical and scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two purposes. It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by virtue of its adaptability and flexibility.
The first flaw is the presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require.
One of the major purposes of state simplifications, collectivization, assembly lines, plantations, and planned communities alike is to strip down reality to the bare bones so that the rules will in fact explain more of the situation and provide a better guide to behaviour. To the extent that this simplification can be imposed, those who make the rules can actually supply crucial guidance and instruction. This, at any rate, is what I take to be the inner logic of social, economic, and productive de-skilling. If the environment can be simplified down to the point where the rules do explain a great deal, those who formulate the rules and techniques have also greatly expanded their power.
Practice has long preceded theory.
Why are the rules of thumb that can be derived from any skilled craft still woefully inadequate to its practice? Artists or cooks, Michael Oakeshott has noted, may in fact write about their art and try to boil it down to technical knowledge, but what they write represents not much of what they know but rather only that small part of their knowledge that can be reduced to exposition. Knowing a craft’s shorthand rules is a very long way from its accomplished performance.
Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of mētis. The subtleties of application are important precisely because mētis is most valuable in settings that are mutable, indeterminant (some facts are unknown), and particular.
The epistemic alternative to mētis is far slower, more laborious, more capital intensive, and not always decisive. When rapid judgments of high (not perfect) accuracy are called for, when it is important to interpret early signs that things are going well or poorly, then there is no substitute for mētis. In the case of the experienced doctor, in fact, it is mētis that informs a decision about whether tests are needed and, if so, which tests.
A recurrent theme of Western philosophy and science, including social science, has been the attempt to reformulate systems of knowledge in order to bracket uncertainty and thereby permit the kind of logical deductive rigor possessed by Euclidean geometry.
The formal order encoded in social-engineering designs inevitably leaves out elements that are essential to their actual functioning. If the factory were forced to operate only within the confines of the roles and functions specified in the simplified design, it would quickly grind to a halt.
To any planned, built, or legislated form of social life, one may apply a comparable test: to what degree does it promise to enhance the skills, knowledge, and responsibility of those who are a part of it? On narrower institutional grounds, the question would be how deeply that form is marked by the values and experience of those who compose it. The purpose in each case would be to distinguish “canned” situations that permit little or no modification from situations largely open to the development and application of mētis.
That most characteristic of human institutions, language, is the best model: a structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open to the improvisations of all its speakers
Antifragile is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. [...] It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves "risk experts"). This provides a solution to what I've called the Black Swan problem – the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence.
I have made the claim that most of history comes from Black Swan events, while we worry about fine-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks.
You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling – very compelling — evidence to show that this is an illusion, the illusion I call lecturing birds how to fly. Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage. Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics.
It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
There exist the kind of people for whom life is some kind of project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a few hours; life starts tasting like food cooked without salt.
When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible — for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility.
We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying the stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procustean bed of cushy and comfortable modernity.
Nature loves small errors, humans don't — hence when you rely on human judgment you are at the mercy of a mental bias that disfavours antifragility. We humans [...] naively fragilize systems — or prevent their antifragility — by protecting them. In other words, a point worth repeating every time it applies, this avoidance of small mistakes makes the large one more severe.
The problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks. Also remember that volatility is information. In fact, these systems tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface.
Modernity is not just the postmedieval, postagrarian, and postfeudal historical period as defined in sociology textbooks. It is rather the spirit of an age marked by rationalization (naive rationalism), the idea that society is understandable, hence must be designed, by humans. [...] Modernity is a Procustean bed, good or bad — a reduction of humans to what appears to be efficient and useful.
Time is the best test of fragility — it encompasses high doses of disorder — and nature is the only system that has been stamped "robust" by time.
The rational flâneur is someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision at every step to revise his schedule, so he can imbibe things based on new information. [...] The flâneur is not a prisoner of a plan. Tourism, actual or figurative, is imbued with the teleological illusion; it assumes completeness of vision and gets one locked into a hard-to-revise program, while the flâneur continuously — and, what is crucial, rationally — modifies his targets as he acquires information.
You don't have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself.
The fragile has no option.
We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn't change.
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. [...] What Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.
Theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations change all the time, and have changed all the time in history, with people involved in the incremental development of ideas thinking they always had a definitive theory; experience remains constant.
The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.
]]>Tools for conviviality2023-07-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/1842300113
As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers. [...] I choose the term "conviviality" to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others.
School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks. Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. [...] Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others.
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
The principal source of injustice in our epoch is political approval for the existence of tools that by their very nature restrict to a very few the liberty to use them in an autonomous way.
People have a native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead. Each of these capacities meets a need. The means for the satisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with only marginal dependence on commodities. [...] These basic satisfactions become scarce when the social environment is transformed in such a manner that basic needs can no longer be met by abundant competence. The establishment of a radical monopoly happens when people give up their native ability to do what they can do for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something "better" that can be done for them only by a major tool.
When centralization and specialization grow beyond a certain point, they require highly programmed operators and clients. More of what each man must know is due to what another man has designed and has the power to force on him.
Movements that seek control over existing institutions give them a new legitimacy, and also render their contradictions more acute. Changes in management are not revolutions.
When ends become subservient to the tools chosen for their sake, the user first feels frustration and finally either abstains from their use or goes mad. [...] When maddening behaviour becomes the standard of a society, people learn to compete for the right to engage in it. Envy blinds people and makes them compete for addiction.
The institutionalisation of knowledge leads to a more general and degrading delusion. It makes people dependent on having their knowledge produced for them.
The world does not contain any information. It is as it is. Information about it is created in the organism through its interaction with the world.
It is almost impossible to insist strongly enough on the distinction between means and ends in an epoch in which purposes have been reduced to operations, in an epoch in which people "raise" consciousness, movements pretend to provide "liberation," languages rather than persons are said to "speak," and politicians "make" revolutions.
]]>Close to the machine2023-08-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/1908968133
It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I'm not sure they'd give their money to a bank or get an airplane ever again.
The project begins in the programmer's mind with the beauty of a crystal. I remember the feel of a system at the early stages of programming, when the knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. [...] Then something happens. As the months of coding go on, the irregularities of human thinking start to emerge.
The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawls: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.
Which bank is "real": the one of marbles or the one with silvery sleek technology? [...] Both are constructions designed to reassure us. You can trust us. Give us your money. Once we were impressed by buildings; now we are impressed by virtual on-line spaces; that's all.
When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. [...] What is about the Internet, with its pretty graphics and simple clicks, that makes users feel so inundated; and about the spreadsheet — so complicated a tool — that makes them bold? [...] The spreadsheet presumes nothing. It has no specific knowledge, no data, no steps it performs. What it offers instead is a complex vocabulary for expressing knowledge.
The spreadsheet and the word processor — two tools empty of information, two little programs sitting patiently and passively for their human owners to put something interesting into them.
I try to warn her that the machine cannot keep rounded edges; that its dumb, declarative nature could not comprehend the small, chaotic accomodations to reality which kept human systems running.
There is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image.
The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion.
Living a virtual life is an art. Like all arts, virtuality is neither consistent nor reliable. It takes a certain firmness of will, and a measure of inspiration, to get up each and every day and make up your existence from scratch. As every artist knows, every writer and homebound mother, if you are not careful, your day — without boundaries at it is — can just leak away. Sundown can find all your efforts puddled around you, everything underway, nothing accomplished.
]]>The carrier bag theory of fiction2023-08-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/1999675991
The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over. [...] So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it. I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. "Technology," or "modern science" [...], is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now). If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's- (killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one. It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.
A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father...
Idea and image juxtapositioned, spinning between myth and rationality, the odd years spent at a right angle; if I over-reach, can I be sure of reclaiming a formula outside habitual movement? How easy it would be to finally slide over, allowing the rest to absolve itself. But remember society owes you nothing, therefore, doing yourself in isn’t the answer, no reward for the resentment, and how would I know if it had proved freedom?
I take, I see, I subject my own mediocre self into something big.
Darkness, only darkness. I seem to have drifted into a chaos that can never be clarified, or even justified.
Dreaming once I became a star, waiting to disintegrate, gradually breaking apart, splash a rocket across the Milky Way. Always this paramount desire to use up the shell—can the shape of the body be the soul, what outward manifestation ever reveals our innermost feelings? Yet there’s enough truth in these steps I take, this cigarette I light, that leaf pressed between a crack in the pavement, and the woman I’ve just left in tears. But once attached then I begin questioning, making demands.
In a moment fixed between one wave and the next, the outline of what might be ahead.
The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue / The setting sun, too indolent to hold / A lengthened tournament for flashing gold, / Passively darkens for night's barbecue.
My body is opaque to the soul.
I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown.
A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly, he knew that he was apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself, cloudy, but real.
I came back to tell you, to shake your hand, and tell you that you are wrong. That something beautiful is going to happen. That the Gardens are purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk. That I came into the Gardens, into life in the Gardens with one whom I did not know. That I danced with her, and did not know her. That I felt passion, contempt and passion for her whom I did not know. That I thought of her. That my thoughts were matches thrown into a dark window. And all the while the Gardens were purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk. I came back to tell you, brother, that white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk. That I am going out and gather petals.
An since then, I've been shapin words after a design that branded here. Know whats here? M soul. Ever heard o that? Th hell y have. Been shapin words t fit m soul. Never told y that before, did I? Thought I couldnt talk. I'll tell y. I've been shapin words; ah, but sometimes thyre beautiful an golden an have a taste that makes them fine t roll over with y tongue.
I was surprised – more than surprised – to think that after almost two years my right and left shoelaces could fail less than two days apart. Apparently my shoe-tying routine was so unvarying and robotic that over those hundreds of mornings I had inflicted identical levels of wear on both laces.
And this was when I realized abruptly that as of that minute (impossible to say exactly which minute), I had finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. Actually, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the sort of person who said "actually" too much. I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast—buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter "knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat-blimped forms of the raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.
Otis, Montgomery, and Westinghouse had not meant for you to falter after a step or two on their machines and finally halt, arriving at the top later than you would had you briskly mounted a fixed, unelectrified flight. They would never have devoted fortunes of development money and man-years of mechanical ingenuity in order to construct a machine possessing all the external characteristics of a regular set of stairs, including individual steps, a practicable grade, and a shiny banister, just so that healthy people like me could stand in states of suspended animation, our eyes in test patterns of vacancy, until we were deposited on the upper level.
People seemed so alike when you imagined their daily schedules, or watched them walk toward the revolving door (as Dave, Sue, and Steve, not noticing me, were doing now), yet if you imagined a detailed thought-frequency chart compiled for each of them, and you tried comparing one chart with another, you would feel suddenly as if you were comparing beings as different from each other as an extension cord and a grape-leaf roll.
The world was not silent. It seemed so only because people were all talking about themselves and for themselves.
I wanted to tell you this, too: consciousness is a bad thing. Consciousness is a dead thing. Free yourselves from consciousness! It is high time. All that is needed is to strip off this garment: nothing very difficult about that. Tear the skin from your body, for it is not a true skin, it is a cellophane tissue that blocks the pores, that asphyxiates. Peel the tissue off, peel it off.
After that, they tell their life story, always the same story, of course, birth, experiences, amorous misadventures, jobs, old age, death. Or else they look at their stupid old yellowed photographs. [...] People really know a tremendous amount: they are fully conscious, aware. They possess about 126,402 words of French, 1,243 words of English, and eleven words of Italian. They have read books, they have listened to songs, they have watched films, they have looked at paintings and statues, they have skimmed throught magazines. They know why the wind blows, why the earth trembles, why the disquieting spots occasionally appear on the sun, and why man appeared on earth in succession to the marine jellies and the lizards and the grasshoppers. People know all that, and many other things besides. Meanwhile the cities expand and contract, and do not concern themselves with knowledge.
Free yourselves, let it be said once more, free yourselves from the Masters of language! But words betray; these creatures that speak on your behalf are destructive. It would be good to be able to think, to be happy, quite simply, alone, without witnesses. It would be good if thought was erect and speedy, travelling far through the air, reaching out to objects and planets and suns.
No one suspected. People talked, and imagined that talking made them free. But they did not know that the words of their own language were slain on the spot, and that all that the Masters returned to them were husks from which the juices had been sucked.
Machines are truly beautiful.
Listen, machines, I wanted to say this to you: help mel Wait! Slow down a little bit! Human beings are incompetent, feeble. They are pebbles. They hear nothing and learn nothing. Human beings turn into stones and the machines crush them. Human beings are the deafest and most inarticulate of all the animals on the face of the earth. Their ears and mouths are enclosed within them. Pebbles, too, are smooth and, as far as I can tell, their orifices are concealed. Men and women pay no attention to the sky that is approaching like a giant roller. What are they doing? They are speaking inside their bodies: their intestinal mouths emit a little gurgle, and their intestinal ears promptly pick up the sound. They never find out what is going on elsewhere, and they neither see nor hear anything that is going on around them. They are not interested. The only thing that interests them is making little gurgling noises with their guts, and listening to the results.
To be a beautiful machine one must first of all remove one's head. That is essential. One must get rid of all one's thoughts, all one's words, the whole garrulous pretentious structure.
It really feels good to be like a machine. When one is like a machine one genuinely knows life. One is in the centre of existence, neither ahead of it nor lagging behind. One no longer lives by means of thoughts and dreams and desires; one lives through life alone. One is a planet in empty space, revolving round the sun. One is - how to put it? — one is IMMENSELY BEAUTIFUL. That is how I would like to spend my time, if I had the time, if I was allowed the time: I would park myself on some road, in the sun, and be a machine. Or install myself in the middle of the desert of some wasteland. And I would make the engine in the middle of my body start turning with a gentle regular sound, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, tak, tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, rak-tak, tak, tak, tak.
What is so terrible is not consciousness itself, but what lies behind it. It is not spectacles and mirrors themselves that frighten and wound, but what exists on the far side of them.
]]>The Springs of Affection2024-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9781913512255
There was not only nothing nice, there was nothing definite at all to remember, only a great many years that had passed along and were now finished, leaving only the remnants of themselves herself, Hubert, the furniture; even the plants in the garden only seemed to hold their position in order to mark the shabbiness of time. All the things that she had collected together and arranged about the house could blow away, or fall into a pitiful heap, if it were not that the walls of the house were attached on both sides to the walls of the neighbouring houses.
Rose had not always been the same, but there was no one now to tell what she had been or to see her as she had been seen.
She found the world difficult, because, while she knew that life is precious and must be watched night and day or it will vanish without warning, she also knew that in the long run life is of no value at all, because it vanishes without warning.
Hubert saw her wrist and her elbow, and in that fragment of her he saw all of Rose.
When she got out of bed in the morning, she had not had a hint that she was seeing the beginning of a day that would never cease to unfold in her memory and that would always be waiting there, undimmed and undamaged, providing her with a place where her mind could rest and find courage.
And she, standing alone as always, had lived to sum them all up. It was a great satisfaction to see finality rising up like the sun. Min thought not many people knew that satisfaction. To watch' the end of all was not much different from watching the beginning of things, and if you weren't ever going to take part anyway, then to watch the end was far and away better.
It's like moments I had with you, when I would love you, moments I couldn't go past because I descended into their depths. It's a state of touching the surrounding energy and I shudder. Some mad, mad harmony.
What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look.
I want the inconclusive. I want the profound organic disorder that nevertheless hints at underlying order. The great potency of potentiality. These babbled phrases of mine are made the very moment they're being written and are so new and green they crackle. They are now. I want the experience of the lack of construction. [...] Life really just barely escapes me though the certainty comes to me that life is other and has a hidden style.
It suddenly occurred to me that you don't need order to live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn't even exist: I am born.
What is called a beautiful landscape causes me nothing but fatigue
I'm going to make an adagio. Read slowly and with peace. It's a wide fresco.
The halo is more important than the things and the words.
I have started to communicate so strongly with you that I stopped being while still existing. You became an I.
I’m tired. My tiredness comes often because I’m an extremely busy person: I look after the world. Every day I look from my terrace at a section of beach and sea and see the thick foam is whiter and that during the night the waters crept forward uneasy. I see this by the mark which the waves leave upon the sand. I look at the almond trees on the street where I live. Before going to sleep I look after the world and see if the night sky is starry and navy blue because on certain nights instead of being black the sky seems to be an intense navy blue, a color I’ve painted in stained glass. I like intensities.
To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a direct living.
For each one of us and at some lost moment of life — is a mission announced that we must accomplish? I however refuse any mission. I won’t accomplish anything: I just live.
But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you. You didn't love me, only I know that. I was alone. Yours alone. I write to no one and a riff is being made that doesn't exist. I unglued myself from me. And I want disarticulation, only then am I in the world. Only then do I feel right.
Now – silence and slight amazement.
Ah living is so uncomfortable. Everything pinches: the body demands, the spirit doesn't stop, living is like being tired and not being able to sleep — living is bothersome. You can't walk naked either in body or in spirit.
]]>The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea2024-02-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/0099284790]]>Things fall apart2024-03-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/9780141023380
There is no story that is not true. [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
Once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do.
New technologies change what we mean by "knowing" and "truth"; they alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is like — a sense of what is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real.
What the monks did not foresee was that the clock is a means not merely of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men.
The unreal knowledge acquired through the written word eventually became the pre-eminent form of knowledge valued by the schools. There is no reason to suppose that such a form of knowledge must always remain so highly valued.
New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with.
The average person today is about as credulous as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.
The world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imaginary, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world.
Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology. [...] Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down.
[Technopoly] is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose.
Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.
All theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family's conception of a child. That is the function of theories—to oversimplify, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless.
The expert in Technopoly has two characteristics that distinguish him or her from experts of the past. First, Technopoly's experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area. The average psychotherapist, for example, barely has even superficial knowledge of literature, philosophy, social history, art, religion, and biology, and is not expected to have such knowledge. Second, like bureaucracy itself (with which an expert may or may not be connected), Technopoly's experts claim dominion not only over technical matters but also over social, psychological, and moral affairs. In the United States, we have experts in how to raise children, how to educate them, how to be lovable, how to make love, how to influence people, how to make friends.
When it comes to machinery, what Technopoly insists upon most is accuracy. The idea embedded in the machine is largely ignored, no matter how peculiar.
If we define ideology as a set of assumptions of which we are barely conscious but which nonetheless directs our efforts to give shape and coherence to the world, then our most powerful ideological instrument is the technology of language itself. Language is pure ideology. It instructs us not only in the names of things but, more important, in what things can be named. It divides the world into subjects and objects. It denotes what events shall be regarded as processes, and what events, things. It instructs us about time, space, and number, and forms our ideas of how we stand in relation to nature and to each other.
To reason in Japanese is apparently not the same thing as to reason in English or Italian or German.
When a method of doing things becomes so deeply associated with an institution that we no longer know which came first—the method or the institution—then it is difficult to change the institution or even to imagine alternative methods for achieving its purposes
Quanti anni avesse Tizia Bonaria allora non era facile da capire, ma erano anni fermi da anni, come fosse invecchiata d'un balzo per sua decisione e ora aspettasse paziente di esser raggiunta dal tempo in ritardo.
Maria non aveva capito per nulla, ma annuì lo stesso, che non tutte le cose si ascoltano per capirle subito.
Niente a Soreni era sbeffeggiato e tenuto ai margini quanto uno stupido, perché se l'astuzia, la forza e l'intelligenza si potevano vincere ad armi pari, la stupidità non aveva peggior nemico di se stessa, e la sua fondamentale imprevedibilità la rendeva pericolosa negli amici più ancora che nei nemici.
]]>Sulla felicità a oltranza2025-04-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.dostoevskij.net/book/8838915601
Questa è la cronaca abbastanza fedele di alcuni anni molto faticosi ma belli che a un certo punto mi sono capitati. L'unica cosa che si può dire è che le cose capitano e noi dobbiamo lasciarle capitare. Ma queste cose che capitano hanno la virtù principale di sfracellarci la testa. Adesso, con un inevitabile sfacelo sulle spalle, portandomelo dietro tutti i giorni, dopo aver preso nota di tante cose sono tornato a vivere il mondo come prima. Un po' mi dispiace.
Poi a esser sinceri fino in fondo mia zia me la porto a spasso tutti i giorni. Non tanto perché io adesso ci pensi continuamente, perché a dire il vero non ci penso mai a mia zia, ma perché mi trovo lì a capire che un morto, causa la cessata attività del suo corpo, si mette a invadere con le sue abitudini i corpi della gente che gli era affezionata. Allora sento che è mia zia a tirare fuori dalla mia bocca quei "Perbacco" che ogni tanto escono dalla mia bocca dove io avrei detto "Dio Porco".
Mia madre non è mai morta del tutto, mia madre, non so né dove né come, ma c'è. Ancora adesso mia madre delle volte mi rompe i maroni in un modo tale che mi trovo a passeggiare tirandole dei cancheri tremendi, a dirle che sarebbe ora mi lasciasse in pace, che di lei non ne voglio più sapere, di lei con la sua etica di merda.
Tra il fare spesso degli atti, anche gli stessi atti tutti i giorni, e avere delle abitudini, ci passa già una tonnellata di differenza.
Per questo, delle volte, mi è venuta la voglia di correre a dire a mia sorella di non deprimersi a causa degli eventi che succedono, in quanto, anche se non ce n'eravamo mai accorti, adesso è diventato ovvio che il nostro cervello globale è stato sempre un grande cimitero. E noi dobbiamo starci dentro.
È verissimo che non ho speranza, ma sto benissimo, e anzi, il solo pensiero di dover pensare a delle speranze mi fa venire l'ansia, perché sto bene dove sto e basta, anche quando sto male.
Negli ultimi anni quando andava a letto si era messo a cercare di ricordarsi tutta la sua vita.
Quel che c'è di migliore a stare al mondo, tutte le volte, salta fuori quanto ti accosti alla tua vita in un modo assolutamente sperimentale, senza nessun progetto in testa, anzi, a dir meglio senza nessun desiderio preciso.
Fare le cose in questo modo, soltanto per stare a vedere che cosa ci salta fuori, senza grandi motivazioni, è l'unico atteggiamento che già dopo poco, nel corso di qualche minuto, fa saltar fuori dal mondo un po' di futuro. Senza l'ombra di alcun dubbio il futuro non sta assolutamente nei desideri. In un desiderio, volendo essere buoni fino in fondo, ci sta tutta la quintessenza della schifezza di un passato che ti incolla a qualcosa che ti sembra proprio tuo, invece è casuale come tutto il resto.
Pensavo che è fondamentale in un amore non accorgersi neanche che c'è, non pensarci mai.
Hai una faccia da miracolo che una volta su due mi stupisce.