Author: tom

Extract from Gary Younge’s new book Stranger in a Strange Land

I have always found America exciting; but, for better or worse, never exceptional. Its efforts at global domination seemed like a plot development in the narrative of European empire rather than a break from it. Even as the French lambasted secretary of state Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council, protesters in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, waved American flags and placards saying: “Bush please help Ivory Coast against French terrorism.” There was precious little moral high ground to go round. Yet everyone, it seemed, was making a stake on it.

So it was with great bemusement that I found myself having to absorb abuse from white, rightwing Americans, who harked back to the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the second world war to justify military aggression in Iraq. They badgered me as though their own reference points represented the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under European colonisation.

“If it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking German,” they would say. “No, if it wasn’t for you,” I would tell them, “I would probably be speaking Yoruba.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The truth is that we are only potentially homo sapiens. We are set apart from the animals precisely by the fact that we are born without any clear guide as to how to deal adequately with the problems of our human condition. The great marvel and misery of humanity is this capacity for bewilderment. This is not, of course, to deny that human being have instincts; it is to affirm the fact that each of us is required to find our own non-instinctual answers to the problems of life, free and happiness (instinct is silent in the face of all the above questions). The sum total of answers we give to the problem of our relationship with the universe, we call religion

David Edwards, Free to be human – intellectual self-defence in an age of illusions, p12

Kurt Vonnergut talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Interview Public Broadcasting Service (2005)

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…

‘On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,’ The Viking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann transl.

There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul — and goes on seeking.

Nietzsche, in Human, all too Human R.J. Hollingdale tr

If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God , universal sinfulness , election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character /not/ to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one’s own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate /believed/ true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.

from Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human R.J. Hollingdale transl.

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are there, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible…

– Nietzsche, unpublished note from 1873

To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet, archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along

I care not if you bridge the seas
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue:
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

— James Elroy Flecker

This classic, finally properly sourced, thanks to Wikiquote

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Sometimes seen as:

All models are false but some models are useful.

Wikiquote continues: ‘The remark has two phrasings, both of which appear in George E.P. Box & Norman R. Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (Wiley 1987) pp. 74 and 424: “Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”; “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.’

Nothing I Can Lose

When I left my father’s house
the sun was halfway up,
my father held it to my chin
like a buttercup.

My father was a snake-oil man
a wizard, trickster, liar,
but this was his best trick,
we kissed goodbye in fire.

A mile above Niagara Falls
a dove gave me the news
of his death. I didn’t miss a step,
there’s nothing I can lose.

Tomorrow I’ll invent a trick
I do not know tonight,
the wind, the pole will tell me what
and the friendly blinding light.

– Leonard Cohen

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened

– Lawrence Durrell

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men

– George Orwell

NICK: I really fancy Ruth, what shall i do?

TIM: This is what you’ll do.

You’ll go in to where she works.

It’ll be a normal day, and you’re sort of testing yourself by looking for an excuse to talk to her. It’s a nothing day in most ways. You’re thinking about some piece of code your writing, or how to improve your bike. It’s just a nothing day

Then you see her.

And she sees you. And she walks right up to you and takes you by the shoulders with both hands

It’s not an affectionate touch, no. It’s a grip. There’s an anger there, and, yes, passion. It’s full of passion

She looks you in the eyes and you look back and you’ve never seen eyes so blue before. There’s a universe as wide as the sky there, and in the centers spinning stars and planets. Enough vast, empty, space for you to be completely lost

Before you can speak she says

“Nick – this is all there is. Me, and you, and now. This is everything. Just us and this moment. And if we can enjoy this moment, really totally live in this moment right now then we’ve won. We’ll be protected for all time against whatever the rest of life can throw at us, because all that life can do is throw more moments at us. And if we can be totally alive in one moment – precisely because it is just one moment, and because though we know it is passing we also know that we can commit ourselves to it fully – if we can do that then we’ll know how to deal with all the other moments that can ever come.

“Nick”, she’ll say, “i need you to help me suck the juice from life, right now, in this moment”

Then

She

Leans

Closer