The Art of Tetman Callis

“Writers can be divided into meteors, planets, and fixed stars.  The first produce a momentary effect: you gaze up, cry: ‘Look!’—and then they vanish forever.  The second, the moving stars, endure for much longer.  By virtue of their proximity they often shine more brightly than the fixed stars, which the ignorant mistake them for.  But they too must soon vacate their place, they shine moreover only with a borrowed light, and their sphere of influence is limited to their own fellow travelers (their contemporaries).  The third alone are unchanging, stand firm in the firmament, shine by their own light and influence all ages equally.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Books and Writing” (trans. Hollingdale)

“The system is rigged.  Look around.  Oil companies guzzle down billions in profits.  Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.  And Wall Street C.E.O.s—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)

“Government gets used to protect those who have already made it.  That becomes the game.  And so we had the big crash and I thought, O.K.!  We tested the alternative theory.  Cut taxes, reduce regulations and financial services, and see what happens to the economy.  We ran a thirty-year test on that and it was a disaster.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.  Nobody.  You built a factory out there, good for you.  But I want to be clear.  You moved your goods to the market on the roads the rest of us paid for.  You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)

“The weak point in all religions remains that they can never dare to confess to being allegorical, so that they have to present their doctrines in all seriousness as true sensu proprio; which, because of the absurdities essential to allegory, leads to perpetual deception and a great disadvantage for religion.  What is even worse, indeed, is that in time it comes to light that they are not true sensu proprio, and then they perish.  To this extent it would be better to admit their allegorical nature straightway: only the difficulty here is to make the people understand that a thing can be true and not true at the same time.  But since we find that all religions are constituted to a greater or less degree in this way, we have to recognize that the absurd is to a certain extent appropriate to the human race, indeed an element of its life, and that deception is indispensable to it.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Religion” (emphasis in original, trans. Hollingdale)

“There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year by ceaselessly rehearsing it before him with solemn earnestness.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Psychology” (trans. Hollingdale)

“If you want to achieve something in business, in writing, in painting, in anything, you must follow the rules without knowing them.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Psychology” (emphasis in original, trans. Hollingdale)

“Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety-valve is to the steam engine: every discontent is by means of it immediately relieved in words—indeed, unless this discontent is very considerable, it exhausts itself in this way.  If, however, it is very considerable, it is as well to know of it in time, so as to redress it.”– Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Law and Politics” (trans. Hollingdale)

“Justice is in itself powerless: what rules by nature is force.  To draw this over on to the side of justice, so that by means of force justice rules—that is the problem of statecraft, and it is certainly a hard one.”– Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Law and Politics” (emphasis in original, trans. Hollingdale)

“Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal.  We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Ethics” (trans. Hollingdale)

“If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it.  But if you do that you will produce nothing great.  If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy and the Intellect” (trans. Hollingdale)

“Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.” – William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only be responsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, like everything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possibly be the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy in which the world appears as one flawless unit of fact.” — William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business, and especially with those of clerking.  What young man is by nature diligent, sober, and regular in his habits?  Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before wealth?  Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring?  One in ten thousand, perhaps.  Bur for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one’s so-called ‘free time,’ one will be allowed to get on with living.  The situation is the most commonplace in the world.  I believe it is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard the ‘social order’: they know that, short of a total revolution in the conduct of human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies and the frustration of their natural desires.” – R. J. Hollingdale, Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms

“In a society like ours, the legal system is, in a sense, a polite gesture granted collectively by millions of people–and it can be overridden just as easily as a river can overflow its banks.  Then a seeming anarchy takes over; but anarchy has its own kinds of rules, no less than does civilized society: it is just that they operate from the bottom up, not from the top down.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

“What is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty?  Is it the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina?  Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us feel that we are not merely looking at a two-dimensional surface; we are responding to some sort of inner meaning inside the picture, a multidimensional aspect trapped somehow inside those two dimensions.  It is the word ‘meaning’ which is important here.  Our minds contain interpreters which accept two-dimensional patterns and then ‘pull’ from them high-dimensional notions which are so complex that we cannot consciously describe them.  The same can be said about how we respond to music.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

“Never try to put too much into any single piece.  There is always a point beyond which it cannot be improved, and further attempts to improve it will in fact destroy it.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

“When you do not think good and when you do not think not-good,what is your true self?  You cannot describe it, you cannot picture it, you cannot admire it, you cannot sense it.  It is your true self, it has nowhere to hide.  When the world is destroyed, it will not be destroyed.” — Mumon, The Gateless Gate (trans. Senzaki and Reps)

“If you think you shouldn’t write it, do. That’s where the good stuff is.” — Averil Dean (interviewed by Rob W. Hart in LitReactor)

“There’s an old saying—or there ought to be one—‘Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist.’  Where is the tension in any novel to be found, after all, but in the discrepancy between a writer’s knowledge if what is and his vision of what ought to be?” – Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

“What matters is that my uncle wouldn’t stop doing drugs. And that one night he got so wasted, he passed out on the railroad tracks and his friends left him there. Because there are people who will leave you on the railroad tracks and there are people who would never do something like that. Not to a friend, not to a stranger, not to an animal, not to a leaf.” — Leesa Cross-Smith, “Five Sketches of a Story About Death”

“You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded.  That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated.  It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents.  It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism in some and for lasting hatred in others.  Again, a man out of the danger area sees the carnage the grenade creates, and he shoots himself in the foot.  Another man had been standing there just two minutes before the thing went off, and thereafter he believes in God or a rabbit’s foot.  Another man sees human brains for the first time and locks up the picture until one night years later, when he finally comes out with a description of what he saw, and the horror of his description turns his wife away from him.” — John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra

“Nothing else really matters but inspiration, being in an inspired relation to being, so that the activity of making art, the act itself, is more important than anything else, it’s more important than the artifact it produces, the thing that everyone sees or hears or reads, the thing they buy or sell, accept or reject.” — Mary Ruefle (interviewed by Bradley Harrison in Denver Quarterly)

“Look at me, I am telling you a truth here; there are girls on hot days you must kiss between the shoulders; there is the soft spot on the belly of a shorthaired dog; a rhubarb pie is baking; a thrush sings; fogs lift; waves break, days break, bread, hearts, vessels, understand?  Look at me, don’t you miss it, understand?” – Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

“There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”

“To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”

“Do you think it’s possible to live and not regret what you have done with your life?  And do you think regret is an emotion, or something more like of a place a person comes to, where you could walk, you know, or sit, or lie in it, like in a house, and go to sleep?” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

“The character of men, apparently, is incidental; virtue is the showershow of sparks erupting from the nose pressed to the grindstone.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

“The secret is there isn’t any secret.  No mystery.  We know it all.  We’re afraid to believe in what we know, and talk is the sound of our terror.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy

“You take a thing like love, and put it in a woman’s mouth, nine times out of ten, it comes out sounding like a threat.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy