But one might have just as much right to say that nobody ought to go to concerts, or visit the theatre, or enjoy any other kind of amusement as long as there are places of punishment in the world with unhappy prisoners in them. This is of course asking too much; for if anyone were to postpone contentment until he were to find no more poverty or misery anywhere, then he would be waiting until the impenetrable end of all time, and until the gray, ice-cold empty end of the world, and by then all joie de vivre would in all probability be utterly gone from him.
"At the end of the tunnel, more tunnel."
"In the darkness of the storm, a ray of darkness."
...
“One day your employees start complaining about insomnia. Many of them call in sick. Those who do show up wear gloves in the office and never remove them. Why? You ask. They don’t respond. Show me your hands, you say. They refuse to show you. You physically force your secretary to remove her gloves. The gloves are filled with blood. You run her hands under the faucet. When the blood drains away, you can see identical cuts on both her palms. The cuts are in the shape of a cross... She has received the stigmata.”
“The stigmata?”
“The stigmata. You see, your secretary is one of the chosen ones.”
“Chosen? For what?”
“You wake up next morning to the sound of a trumpet call. The sun is turning black, like a rotten lemon. At the northern end of Broadway, seven horses appear in the middle of the avenue. They are as white as ivory. Astride the beasts are horsemen cloaked up to their eyes in dark garments. The horses begin to march downtown.
“The East River has turned to blood. The Harlem into blood. The Hudson – also blood. Blood spurts out of the tap. There is a red ring around the shower drain. Blood comes out of there too... The Blood is thick and dark, almost black. It clots the pipes. Plants and crops start to wither. People raid supermarkets for bottled water. When that runs out, they start drinking the blood. The blood is nothing like normal blood. It tastes awful.”
“Zukor? Are you alright? Alec, is he alright?”
“This taste,” said Mitchell, “this is the taste of the future.”
Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.
... But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.
... It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
... I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
... Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason.
The technique of removing redundant data in a file is called compression. The technique of using a model of a listener to remove additional data is a special kind of “lossy” compression called perceptual coding. Because it uses both kinds of compression, the MP3 carries within it practical and philosophical understandings of what it means to communicate, what it means to listen or speak, how the mind’s ear works, and what it means to make music. Encoded in every MP3 are whole worlds of possible and impossible sound and whole histories of sonic practices... But MP3 encoders build their files by calculating a moment- to- moment relationship between the changing contents of a recording and the gaps and absences of an imagined listener at the other end. The MP3 encoder works so well because it guesses that its imagined auditor is an imperfect listener, in less-than-ideal conditions. It often guesses right.
"It’s not a good cast of human being here,” he said. “The people are relatively short. The infants are given ‘brandy rags’ to suck, to keep them from screaming… Alcohol has displaced milk. They all have high squeaky voices. Most of them are crippled in one form or another. All of them are conceived in drunkenness. For the most part criminal characters… Child abuse, killings, are Sunday afternoon stuff… The animals are better off: after all, what people would really like is a pig, not a kid"
"One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years..."
... A year ago, he took over from a man who died of septicemia. “He scratched himself with a fawn’s bone."
"My notion of infinity is the same as the one I had when I was three years old. Less than that. It begins where your eyes end. Where everything ends. And it never begins."
"The world isn't the world, it's a zero."
"You know," the painter said, "that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy... Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything... I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions... I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very great, the very greatest emetics... Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum?"
"What goes on in a brain that conceives itself to be the centre of the world. Millions of lights going on and off in millions of centres! That's the world. That's all it is."
"You are molested wherever you go”, said the painter. “It’s as if everyone had conspired to bother you. An instinct that rages through them all like wildfire. Against you. You wake up, and you feel molested. In fact: the hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast!"
"Worth is worthlessness, the calamity of worthlessness is the worthlessness of one’s own world and of the world unconnected to one’s own."
As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.
... No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
...in my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.
... I liked forgetting my cares. Thanks to wine, you didn't forget them, they just stopped scaring you for a while.
For some time now Wandernburg had been visible in the distance, to the south. And yet, thought Hans, as often happens at the end of an exhausting day, the small city seemed to be moving in step with them,and getting no nearer.
... Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.
... Packing a bag doesn't make you aware of changes, rather it compels you to postpone the past, and the present is taken up with concerns about the immediate. Time slides over the travelers' skin.
