“That year was one of the poorest my family ever lived through. There was much excitement one day about a week before Christmas when three older men in suits showed up at our door carrying boxes and bags of food. I think they were either Shriners or Masons, but I can’t remember. I do remember my mother hugging them all and thanking them over and over while my sister and I ran around their legs like hungry cats, anxious to see what treats were in those sacks. My mother was crying uncontrollably and kept hugging those men. They didn’t say much, just told her she was welcome and left as quickly as they came. This was our Christmas dinner. We received gifts from such groups more than once. Most often it was the Salvation Army.
“My father was deeply ashamed for having to accept a handout. That’s something that gets drilled into the heads of white males in the South from the moment they can speak—never accept anything that you haven’t earned for yourself. Having to accept the handout deeply wounded my father in some way that pushed him close to the edge of an emotional cliff. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it; I just knew that my dad was acting strange, and that he was chewing his nails so viciously that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it’s because a man who accepted a handout wasn’t really seen as being much of a man—especially by the man himself. Any man with two working arms and legs who signed up on welfare wasn’t seen very differently from a thief, a liar, or a rapist.” – Damien Echols, Life After Death
“This must be noted, that it is the nature of such things to be spoiled by defect and excess; as we see in the case of health and strength (since for the illustration of things which cannot be seen we must use those that can), for excessive training impairs the strength as well as deficient: meat and drink, in like manner, in too great or too small quantities, impair the health: while in due proportion they cause, increase, and preserve it.
“Thus it is therefore with the habits of perfected Self-Mastery and Courage and the rest of the Virtues: for the man who flies from and fears all things, and never stands up against anything, comes to be a coward; and he who fears nothing, but goes at everything, comes to be rash. In like manner too, he that tastes of every pleasure and abstains from none comes to lose all self-control; while he who avoids all, as do the dull and clownish, comes as it were to lose his faculties of perception: that is to say, the habits of perfected Self-Mastery and Courage are spoiled by the excess and defect, but by the mean state are preserved.
“Furthermore, not only do the origination, growth, and marring of the habits come from and by the same circumstances, but also the acts of working after the habits are formed will be exercised on the same: for so it is also with those other things which are more directly matters of sight, strength for instance: for this comes by taking plenty of food and doing plenty of work, and the man who has attained strength is best able to do these: and so it is with the Virtues, for not only do we by abstaining from pleasures come to be perfected in Self-Mastery, but when we have come to be so we can best abstain from them: similarly too with Courage: for it is by accustoming ourselves to despise objects of fear and stand up against them that we come to be brave; and after we have come to be so we shall be best able to stand up against such objects.
“And for a test of the formation of the habits we must take the pleasure or pain which succeeds the acts; for he is perfected in Self-Mastery who not only abstains from the bodily pleasures but is glad to do so; whereas he who abstains but is sorry to do it has not Self-Mastery: he again is brave who stands up against danger, either with positive pleasure or at least without any pain; whereas he who does it with pain is not brave.
“For Moral Virtue has for its object-matter pleasures and pains, because by reason of pleasure we do what is bad, and by reason of pain decline doing what is right (for which cause, as Plato observes, men should have been trained straight from their childhood to receive pleasure and pain from proper objects, for this is the right education).” — Aristotle, The Ethics (ed. Smith)
“In whatever cases we get things by nature, we get the faculties first and perform the acts of working afterwards; an illustration of which is afforded by the case of our bodily senses, for it was not from having often seen or heard that we got these senses, but just the reverse: we had them and so exercised them, but did not have them because we had exercised them. But the Virtues we get by first performing single acts of working, which, again, is the case of other things, as the arts for instance; for what we have to make when we have learned how, these we learn how to make by making: men come to be builders, for instance, by building; harp-players, by playing on the harp: exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave actions brave.
“And to the truth of this testimony is borne by what takes place in communities: because the law-givers make the individual members good men by habituation, and this is the intention certainly of every law-giver, and all who do not effect it well fail of their intent; and herein consists the difference between a good Constitution and a bad.
“Again, every Virtue is either produced or destroyed from and by the very same circumstances: art too in like manner; I mean it is by playing the harp that both the good and the bad harp-players are formed: and similarly builders and all the rest; by building well men will become good builders; by doing it badly bad ones: in fact, if this had not been so, there would have been no need of instructors, but all men would have been at once good or bad in their several arts without them.
“So too then is it with the Virtues: for by acting in the various relations in which we are thrown with our fellow men, we come to be, some just, some unjust: and by acting in dangerous positions and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we come to be, some brave, others cowards.
“Similarly is it also with respect to the occasions of lust and anger: for some men come to be perfected in selfmastery and mild, others destitute of all self-control and passionate; the one class by behaving in one way under them, the other by behaving in another. Or, in one word, the habits are produced from the acts of working like to them: and so what we have to do is to give a certain character to these particular acts, because the habits formed correspond to the differences of these.
“So then, whether we are accustomed this way or that straight from childhood, makes not a small but an important difference, or rather I would say it makes all the difference.” – Aristotle, The Ethics (ed. Smith)
“For most of our lives we are all doctors to ourselves. Not when we’re old, and everything feels so numb and dead, and decency and disgust forbid enquiry. And not when we are young, and the body is an unexamined ecstasy. Just the time in between. Mark them, in coffee shops, on buses, wincing, wondering, doctors to themselves, medicine men and faith healers, diagnosticians and anesthetists, silent consultants to themselves.” — Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow
“A sense of humour is a serious business; and it isn’t funny, not having one. Watch the humourless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humourless can programme themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick – and that’s about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally ‘challenged’, as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humour). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down.” – Martin Amis, “No Laughing Matter”
“To hope for the recognition of a distant future makes sense if one assumes that mankind will remain essentially unchanged and that all greatness is bound to be felt as great not only in a single age but in all ages. This, however, is an error; mankind undergoes great transformations in its feeling for and judgement of what is good and beautiful; it is fantasizing to believe of oneself that one is a mile further on in advance and that all mankind is going along our road. In addition: a scholar who fails to gain recognition may be quite sure that his discovery will also be made by others and that at the best some future historian will acknowledge that he already knew this or that but was not able to obtain general acquiescence in the matter. Failure to gain recognition will always be interpreted by posterity as lack of vigour. – In short, one should not be too ready to speak up for proud isolation. There are of course exceptions; but as a rule it is our faults, weaknesses and follies that hinder recognition of our great qualities.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“The Socialists desire to create a comfortable life for as many as possible. If the enduring homeland of this comfortable life, the perfect state, were really to be attained, then the comfortable life would destroy the soil out of which great intellect and the powerful individual in general grows: by which I mean great energy. If this state is achieved mankind will have become too feeble still to be able to produce the genius. Ought one therefore not to desire that life should retain its violent character and savage forces and energies continue to be called up again and again? The warm, sympathizing heart will, of course, desire precisely the abolition of that savage and violent character of life, and the warmest heart one can imagine would long for it the most passionately: and yet precisely this passion would nonetheless have derived its fire, its warmth, indeed its very existence from that savage and violent character of life; the warmest heart thus desires the abolition of its own foundation, the destruction of itself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“There will always have to be bad writers, for they answer to the taste of the immature, undeveloped age-group; these have their requirements as well as do the mature. If human life were longer, the number of mature individuals would preponderate or at least be equal to that of the immature; as things are, however, most by far die too young, that is to say there are always many more undeveloped intellects with bad taste. These, moreover, desire that their requirements be satisfied with the greater vehemence of youth, and they demand bad authors and get them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
Two new pieces are posted this morning in the “Previously Published Stories” sidebar. Last year the editors at Salt Hill contacted writers who had previously had work published in the magazine–mine was “Tossing Baby to the Tiger,” published in Salt Hill 14–and asked us if we would submit new work to be considered for their anniversary issue, Salt Hill 30. I sent something and they rejected it. They asked me to try again and I sent “Extinguisher” and they accepted it. They also asked me if I could write a little something about the story and how it was written. I did and that is “Unpacking the Object.” The two pieces are understandably published together here.
“The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all round (and its industrial dimensions are an inescapable modern theme). It is there because men—in their hundreds of millions—want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger.” – Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché
“If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of everlasting damnation were true, it would be a sign of weakmindedness 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 one’s 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.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“There are sober and industrious people to whom religion adheres like a border of higher humanity: such people do well to remain religious, it beautifies them. – All men incapable of wielding some kind of weapon or other – mouth and pen included as weapons – become servile: for these Christianity is very useful, for within Christianity servility assumes the appearance of a virtue and is quite astonishingly beautified. – People whose daily life appears to them too empty and monotonous easily become religious: this is understandable and forgivable; only they have no right to demand religiosity of those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“The Greeks did not see the Hellenic gods as set above them as masters, or themselves set beneath to gods as servants, as the Jews did. They saw as it were only the reflection of the most successful exemplars of their own caste, that is to say an ideal, not an antithesis of their own nature. They felt inter-related with them, there existed a mutual interest, a kind of symmetry. Man thinks of himself as noble when he bestows upon himself such gods, and places himself in a relationship to them such as exists between the lower aristocracy and the higher; while the Italic peoples have a real peasant religion, with continual anxiety over evil and capricious powers and tormenting spirits. Where the Olympian gods failed to dominate, Greek life too was gloomier and more filled with anxiety. – Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely and buried him as though in mud: into a feeling of total depravity it then suddenly shone a beam of divine mercy, so that, surprised and stupefied by this act of grace, man gave vent to a cry of rapture and for a moment believed he bore all heaven within him. It is upon this pathological excess of feeling, upon the profound corruption of head and heart that was required for it, that all the psychological sensations of Christianity operate: it desires to destroy, shatter, stupefy, intoxicate, the one thing it does not desire is measure: and that is why it is in the profoundest sense barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Hellenic.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“In the history of women, there is probably no matter, apart from contraception, more important than literacy. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, access to power required knowledge of the world. This could not be gained without reading and writing, skills that were granted to men long before they were to women. Deprived of them, women were condemned to stay home with the livestock, or, if they were lucky, with the servants. (Alternatively, they may have been the servants.) Compared with men, they led mediocre lives. In thinking about wisdom, it helps to read about wisdom—about Solomon or Socrates or whomever. Likewise, goodness and happiness and love. To decide whether you have them, or want to make the sacrifices necessary to get them, it is useful to read about them. Without such introspection, women seemed stupid; therefore, they were considered unfit for education; therefore, they weren’t given an education; therefore they seemed stupid.” – Joan Acocella, “Turning the Page”
“He who wants to become wise will profit greatly from at some time having harboured the idea that mankind is fundamentally evil and corrupt: it is a false idea, as is its opposite; but it enjoyed dominance throughout whole ages of history, and its roots have branched out even into us ourselves and our world. To understand ourselves we must understand it; but if we are then ourselves to rise higher, we must rise up above it. We then come to recognize that there is no such thing as sin in the metaphysical sense; but, in the same sense, no such thing as virtue, either; that this whole domain of moral ideas is in a state of constant fluctuation, that there exist higher and deeper conceptions of good and evil, of moral and immoral.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“Observe children who weep and wail in order that they shall be pitied, and therefore wait for the moment when their condition will be noticed; live among invalids and the mentally afflicted and ask yourself whether their eloquent moaning and complaining, their displaying of misfortune, does not fundamentally have the objective of hurting those who are with them: the pity which these then express is a consolation for the weak and suffering, inasmuch as it shows them that, all their weakness nothwithstanding, they posses at any rate one power: the power to hurt. In this feeling of superiority of which the manifestation of pity makes him conscious, the unfortunate man gains a sort of pleasure; in the conceit of his imagination he is still of sufficient importance to cause affliction in the world. The thirst for pity is thus a thirst for self-enjoyment, and that at the expense of one’s fellow men; it displays man in the whole ruthlessness of his own dear self.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“An instant realization sees endless time.
Endless time is as one moment.
When one comprehends the endless moment
He realizes the person who is seeing it.”
— Mumon, The Gateless Gate (trans. Senzaki and Reps)
“The state never has any use for truth as such, but only for truth which is useful to it, more precisely for anything whatever useful to it whether it be truth, half-truth or error. A union of state and philosophy can therefore make sense only if philosophy can promise to be unconditionally useful to the state, that is to say, to set usefulness to the state higher than truth. It would of course be splendid for the state if it also had truth in its pay and service; but the state itself well knows that it is part of the essence of truth that it never accepts pay or stands in anyone’s service.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred-eyed conscience could not find us out there, how we hasten to give our heart to the state, to money-making, to sociability or science merely so as no longer to possess it ourselves, how we labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself; universal too is the shy concealment of this haste because everyone wants to seem content and would like to deceive more sharp-eyed observers as to the wretchedness he feels.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale)
“Wherever money achieves preeminence, i.e. cities, it radically reshapes the perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of the people who use it to organize their social relations not as ties but exchanges. The minds of intellectually sophisticated metropolitans become quite literally minds of money, full of the thoughts and judgments money would have, if it could have them.” — Erwin Montgomery, “The Withdrawal Method”
“When the historical sense reigns without restraint, and all its consequences are realized, it uproots the future because it destroys illusions and robs the things that exist of the atmosphere in which alone they can live. Historical justice, even when it is genuine and practised with the purest of intentions, is therefore a dreadful virtue because it always undermines the living thing and brings it down: its judgment is always annihilating. If the historical drive does not also contain a drive to construct, if the purpose of destroying and clearing is not to allow a future already alive in anticipation to raise its house on the ground thus liberated, if justice alone prevails, then the instinct for creation will be enfeebled and discouraged. A religion, for example, which is intended to be transformed into historical knowledge under the hegemony of pure historical justice, a religion which is intended to be understood through and through as an object of science and learning, will when this process is at an end also be found to have been destroyed. The reason is that historical verification always brings to light so much that is false, crude, inhuman, absurd, violent that the mood of pious illusion in which alone anything that wants to live can live necessarily crumbles away: for it is only in love, only when shaded by the illusion produced by love, that is to say in the unconditional faith in right and perfection, that man is creative.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“Men and ages which serve life by judging and destroying a past are always dangerous and endangered men and ages. For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible wholly to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate: — always a dangerous attempt because it is so hard to know the limit of denial of the past and because second natures are usually weaker than the first. What happens all to often is that we know the good but do not do it, because we also know the better but cannot do it.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale)
“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness–what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say: ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’–but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale)
“When platitudes, commonplaces and hackneyed and feeble language are the rule, and badness and corruption received as stimulating exceptions, then the forceful, uncommon and beautiful falls into disfavor.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale)
“A great victory is a great danger. Human nature finds it harder to endure a victory than a defeat; indeed, it seems to be easier to achieve a victory than to endure it in such a way that it does not in fact turn into a defeat.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale)
“One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.” — Count Leo Tolstoy (quoted by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience)