I don’t enjoy flying. The wide range of emotions offered whilst taking off and zipping through the air is a volatile mix of fear, anxiety, dread, boredom, disbelief, and suspicion of every operating system the plane uses. A bump of turbulence ignites my survival instinct that instructs me to grab the nearest object or person and cling to it/them for dear life. When the plane begins its descent a wave of euphoria, hardly felt in my day to day life, cleanses me. I’m released from the funk I’ve been locked in for the past few hours and by the time I’m through customs the ordeal is virtually forgotten. I’ll live to fly again. Oddly enough, what I do enjoy about flying is being in an airport. Glass and concrete Mecca’s of continuous human flow; a conduit of a shared experience that so utterly depends on perspective. There are not many places in the world where so many humans of varied backgrounds, ethnicity, religion, or class convene in one place and do it in peaceful and cooperative terms. Their day to day lives hardly ever untwine; but for a few hours they are united in flight and destination. They may even sit side by side whilst flying and connect with one another. Could the Earth’s socio-political issues be dealt with inside a bustling airport?
What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.
As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.
What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
The naked reality of capitalism is today on display. And it's horrible.
The subject of this book is not merely crime and suicide, but more broadly the establishment of a kingdom of nihilism and the suicidal drive that is permeating contemporary culture, together with a phenomenology of panic, aggression and resultant violence.
Financial capitalism is based on a process of unrelenting deterritorialization, and this is causing fear to spread among those who are unable to deal with the precariousness of daily life and the violence of the labour market. This fear in turn provokes a counter-effect of aggressive re-territorialization by those who try to grasp some form of identity, some sense of belonging, because only a feeling of belonging offers the semblance of shelter, a form of protection. But belonging can only be conclusively proved by an act of aggression against the other, the combined effect of deterritorialization in the sphere of financial capitalism and of re-territorialization in the realm of identity is leading to a state of permanent war.
Now, it is finally crystal clear: resistance is over. Capitalist absolutism will not be defeated and democracy will never be reinstated. That game is over.
Unreality is a condition of life.
"...But what am I getting at? Why don't you hate the fact that we were forced to grab hold of the same log, the fact that we were cast up on the same island, berthed on the same ship! Why hate me in place of everyone? Here, here!" Mitishatyev jumped up. "These walls here, this banality, these dead men! Whom we, the living, exploit! This age, which forces us to know everything about each other! Because we do know everything! We know so terribly much about each other that--never mind hatred, I can't see why we didn't kill each other, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago! We live on each other, we go to the same latrine, gobble the same corpse of Russian literature and take away the taste of it with the same fixed dinner menu, we use the same monthly ticket to ride the same bus to the same apartment and watch the same TV, drink the same vodka, and use the same newspaper to wrap our solitary herring! Why do you put up with all this, and not with poor little me?"
It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.
No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.
Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next.
His trembling words also invoked an epistimology of 'hope and horror', of exposing once and for all the true nature of this 'great gray ritual of existence' and plunging headlong into an 'enlightenment of inanity'...
In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride.
Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.
What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?
This heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as
if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.
Let us assume that we are fucked.
Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.
If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.
If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.
