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Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover — except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give. Most children are surrounded by their rights (their right to indulgence, to consolation, etc.): and so they do not and cannot fall in love. But if a child — as a result of circumstances — comes to realize that such rights as he does enjoy are not fundamental, if he has recognized, however inarticulately, that happiness is not something that can be assured and promised but is something that each has to try to find for himself, if he is aware of being essentially alone, then he may find himself anticipating pure, gratuitous and continual gifts offered by another and the state of that anticipation is the state of being in love.
John Berger, G. -
It begins with a crisis of the state that enables a ‘dissident social bloc’ to mobilize the people into a political project. A ‘catastrophic stand-off’ develops between the bloc of power and the bloc of the people, which in the case of Latin America was able to be resolved for the moment on the side of the people. The new government must then ‘convert opposition demands into acts of state,’ and build a deeper and broader hegemony by ‘combining the ideas of mobilized society with material resources provided by or via the state.’ The turning point (‘point of bifurcation’), for Garcia Linera, comes through a ‘series of confrontations’ between the blocs that are resolved in unexpected ways, with either the consolidation of the new situation or the reconstitution of the old. We are at or near the point of bifurcation. What will come next cannot be predicted.
VJ Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South -
Some say of my writing that it is too overburdened with metaphor and simile: that nothing is ever what it is but is always like something else. This is true, but why is this so? Whatever I perceive or imagine amazes me by its particularity. The qualities it has in common with other things – leaves, a trunk, branches, if it is a tree: limbs, eyes, hair, if it is a person – appear to me to be superficial. I am deeply struck by the uniqueness of each event. From this arises my difficulty as a writer – perhaps the magnificent impossibility of my being a writer. How am I to convey such uniqueness? The obvious way is to establish uniqueness through development. To persuade you, for example, of the uniqueness of Leonie’s experence by telling you the story of what happened when Eduard discovered that Leonie had been unfaithful to him. In this way the uniqueness of an event can be explained by its causes and effects. But I have little sense of unfolding time. The relations which I perceive between things – and these often include casual and historical relations – tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters. And so I am forced to use another method to try to place and define events. A method which searches for co-ordinates extensively in space, rather than consequentially in time. I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-ordinates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them.
John Berger, G. -
When we’d been living together for a year she left me for a German, by the name of Kurt something or other. She told me she was in love and then she cried, because she felt sorry for me or just because she was happy, I don’t know. Come on, that’s enough, mala mujer, I said to her. She started laughing like she always did when I spoke my language. I started laughing too. We shared a bottle of vodka and said good-bye.
Roberto Bolaño, “Snow,” The Return -
“If you would know the truth, strive to be a person with whom no one need be ashamed of anything, with whom nothing is forbidden.” -CrimethInc., Rolling Thunder #2
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“‘Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more,’ says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. ‘But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling.’ To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”
-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the distance that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
“For many years i have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. ‘Longing,’ says poet Robert Hass, ‘because desire is full of endless distances.’ Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world… .
“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance wthout wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.”
-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, ‘How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’ … The question she carried struck me the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration – how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost -
The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominantly white and male. White men comprised 78 percent of the arrests for this offense in 1990 when the new mandatory minimum sentences were adopted. They are generally charged with misdemeanors and typically receive sentences involving fines, license suspension, and community service. Although drunk driving contains a far greater risk of violent death than the use or sale of illegal drugs, the societal response to drunk drivers has generally emphasized keeping the person functional and in society, while attempting to respond to the dangerous behavior through treatment and counseling. People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison
Michelle Alexander, “On the Irrational Race Bias of the Criminal Justice and Prison Systems, Truthout.Posted on October 28, 2012 with 5 notes
Source: truth-out.org
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The thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
Matt Taibbi, “How I learned to stop worrying and love the OWS protests,” Rolling StonePosted on October 25, 2012 with 1 note
Source:
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That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds.
That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.
That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.
That addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as in ‘poor in spirit’) or an O.C.D.-like disorder or an affective or character disorder, and that over 75% of the veteran Boston AAs who want to convince you that it is a disease will make you sit down and watch them write DISEASE on a piece of paper and then divide and hyphenate the word so that it becomes DIS–EASE, then will stare at you as if expecting you to undergo some kind of blinding epiphanic realization, when really, changing DISEASE to DIS–EASE reduces a definition and explanation down to a simple description of a feeling, and rather a whiny insipid one at that.
That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking actively consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.
That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
That the cliché ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliché. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.
That cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.
That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.
That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.
That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.
That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.
That it is permissible to want.
That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everybody else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.Partial list of the “many exotic new facts you will acquire” if “by virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility,” David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (p. 200-205) -
Humans appear to be designed to be paranoid; they are designed to see intentional agents behind natural phenomena. This is because making the mistake of thinking that a natural event has an intentional agent behind it is less potentially costly than being oblivious and thinking that an intentional event, like someone trying to kill you, has a coincidental cause. The paranoid outlive the oblivious. Belief in God may be a consequence of this tendency.
Satoshi Kanazawa, “The disadvantage of smarts.”Posted on September 17, 2012 with 5 notes
Source: economist.com
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Intelligent people do well in almost every sphere of modern life, except for the most important things, like how to find a mate, how to raise a child, how to make friends. Intelligence does not confer any advantage for solving all the evolutionarily familiar problems that our ancestors encountered.
Satoshi Kanazawa, “The disadvantage of smarts” -
The main determinants of childrens’ performance continues to be the socioeconomic conditions of their parents. Those unwilling to take the steps necessary to address the latter (e.g. promote full employment) are the ones who do not care about our children.
Posted on September 17, 2012 via The American Bear with 150 notes
Source: theamericanbear
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Although I had felt my debt like a weight as soon as I took it on, it wasn’t until that interview that I saw it for what it was: a gap between me and the life I’d prepared for. I began to realize that debt would drive me harder than ambition, and in a different direction.
Alexandra Kimball, “How to Succeed in Journalism when You Can’t Afford an Internship”
"A man unstuck from place and time, he travels the world on foot, his only lifeline to his friends and family a litany of dreary picture-postcards sent from arbitrary locations the world over."
