Put that in your pipe and smoke itPut that in your pipe and smoke it
“Freedom, if it’s universal freedom, must allow for the failure of others.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Category: Lit & Crit
What if I plug this into that…?What if I plug this into that…?
“Recognizing one’s limits seems a form of fair trade: if we withdraw some of our claims on the world, surely those remaining will be met. Yet the wish to determine the world can’t be coherently limited, for you cannot know which event will turn out to be not just another event, but one that will change your life.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Cosmic psychopathy is probably not the solutionCosmic psychopathy is probably not the solution
“To imagine a God who judges many of the forms of life He created to be sinful, then tortures us eternally for our brief participation in them, is hardly to imagine a solution to the problem of evil.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Objects of a studyObjects of a study
“What if the world were created by a Being whose whole purpose was to cause us torment and illusion? God knows it sometimes looks that way.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
No, he’s not talking about FacebookNo, he’s not talking about Facebook
“Everywhere I see people who talk continually about themselves. Their conversation is a mirror which always shows their own conceited faces. They will talk to you about the tiniest events in their lives, which they expect to be magnified in your eyes by the interest that they themselves take in them.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 50,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
Busy little bees we beBusy little bees we be
“Those who enjoy learning are never idle.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 48,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
It’s a POV issueIt’s a POV issue
“The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.” – Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
Hindbrain to the forefrontHindbrain to the forefront
“Nothing is more depressing than consolations based on the necessity of evil, the uselessness of remedies, the inevitability of fate, the order of Providence, or the misery of the human condition. It is ridiculous to try to alleviate misfortune by observing that we are born to be miserable. It is much better to prevent the mind from indulging in such reflections, and to treat men as emotional beings, instead of treating them as rational.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 33,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
Let’s get it straight, peopleLet’s get it straight, people
“I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written.” – Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
Running out of GassRunning out of Gass
“A limp that tells the world we are compensating for an injury becomes a habit hard to break even when its cause has healed and there is no longer any ‘reason’ for it. Except that the limp wishes to remain. Our stutter wants to stay. Our fall from a ladder would be forever like a cast-out angel if we didn’t fetch up in a lake of fire or at least on a floor.” — William H. Gass, “Auguste Rodin,” from A Temple of Texts
What the word meansWhat the word means
“All of us have emotions urgently seeking release, and many of us have opinions we think would do the world some good; however, the poet must also be a maker, as the Greeks maintained, and, like the sculptor, like every other artist, should aim at adding real beings to the world, beings fully realized, not just things like tools and haberdashery that nature has neglected to provide, or memos and laws that society produces in abundance.” — William H. Gass, “Auguste Rodin,” from A Temple of Texts
Out here on the perimeterOut here on the perimeter
“The world is not simply good and bad on different weekends like an inconsistent pitcher; we devour what we savor and what sustains us; out of ruins more ruins will after, in their polished towers, rise; lust is the muscle of love: its strength, its coarseness, its brutality; the heart beats and is beaten by its beating; not a shadow falls without the sun’s shine and the sun sears what it saves. These are not the simplicities my saying has suggested. In our civilization, the center has not held for a long time; neither the center nor the place where the center was can now be found. We are disordered, arthritic fingers without palms. Inside the silence of unmoving things, there are the sounds of repeated explosions. Perhaps it is catastrophe breathing.” — William H. Gass, “Humors of Blood & Skin,” from A Temple of Texts
What writers can be like to live withWhat writers can be like to live with
“There are those who like to sail alone around the world; they shut themselves up in towers to write or watch for fires; in huts encased in ice, they give up their lives to loneliness; who hunt for pelts in the mountains or are driven with aimless intensity from place to place like sand through a desert; fly solo, take to the woods. Searching for a second self, they dislike distraction. They want something to pit their strength against: angel or shade or element of nature that will assume the shape, and become the substance, of their enemy within.” — William H. Gass, “On Heroes and Tombs,” from A Temple of Texts
It counts whether it’s made to or notIt counts whether it’s made to or not
“When Mies van der Rohe said that God was in the details, and Paul Valéry insisted that there were no details in execution, both meant the same thing—namely that every element of the work must be made to count.” — William H. Gass, “Three Lives,” from A Temple of Texts
Happy EasterHappy Easter
“I must say I trust hatred more than love. It is frequently constructive, despite the propaganda to the contrary; it is less frequently practiced by hypocrites; it is more clearly understood; it is painfully purchased and therefore often earned; and its objects sometimes even deserve their hoped-for fate. If you love the good, you have to hate evil. I cannot imagine a love so puerile and thin and weak-kneed it cannot rage.” — William H. Gass, “Fifty Literary Pillars,” from A Temple of Texts
Let there be no misunderstandingLet there be no misunderstanding
“Everything around us is terrifying. There is no longer a common language. No one understands anyone else. I believe no one wants to understand.” — Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies (quoted in “Influence,” from A Temple of Texts, by William H. Gass (emphasis in original))
They end up smelling bad, tooThey end up smelling bad, too
“If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey.” — William H. Gass, “Influence,” from A Temple of Texts
Drop and give me fiftyDrop and give me fifty
“True strength, throughout its spectrum, shows itself through unflustered gentleness and forbearance, since only such strength has nothing to fear.” — William H. Gass, “Influence,” from A Temple of Texts
But you can get it with tenure and a pensionBut you can get it with tenure and a pension
“It may be that in a state of nature, since it is a state of war, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but in our present state of mediocrity, it is cowardly, shallow, tedious, banal, and uselessly drawn out.” — William H. Gass, “To a Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics,” from A Temple of Texts
Would we know it if we saw itWould we know it if we saw it
“It is not death that is to be feared but, rather—and something history should be devoted to demonstrating—the loss of excellence.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
Ain’t no fixin none of thatAin’t no fixin none of that
“A fiction is forever a fiction, and everything that was will remain as it was eternally.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
Put that in your pipe and smoke itPut that in your pipe and smoke it
“No amount of relativism, no degree of deconstruction, no namby-pamby pluralism, despite debunking, the disclosure of bias, the so-called unreliability of observers and their cultural conditioning—their class and color blindness—or the oft-bewailed problems of representation, language’s betrayal of the mind, should be allowed to shake the singleness, consistency, and wholeness of any happening.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
The sine qua nonThe sine qua non
“To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.” — Gustave Flaubert (quoted in Tests of Time, by William H. Gass)
There’s a word for thatThere’s a word for that
“For the real writer, life does more than accept or resemble language; it coughs up words like gobs of bloody spit, suggests them, insists, and every one is more historical than history, deep beyond diving, wide beyond reach.” — William H. Gass, “Quotations from Chairman Flaubert,” from Tests of Time
Watch your step! Don’t touch that!Watch your step! Don’t touch that!
“A writer should be wary of the world, as if it were a place of poisonous ivies and venomous snakes.” — William H. Gass, “Quotations from Chairman Flaubert,” from Tests of Time
The mushroom peopleThe mushroom people
“A book may have been published, but it is not available if I don’t know it exists; if it costs more than I can afford; if it is locked up and out of reach; if I am illiterate, or ashamed of bookishness, or teased or told I am uppity if I want to rise above my fellows. Entire societies are devoted to keeping their citizens ignorant, unskilled, unschooled, fanatical in support of their own stupidity and of the forces which would switch off every intellectual light.” — William H. Gass, “The Shears of the Censor,” from Tests of Time
How do I autograph my ebook?How do I autograph my ebook?
“Ideally, magazines should be supported by their subscribers. But our educational system doesn’t produce such audiences. We publish poetry; we don’t read it. We like it performed for us so that it will, with the poet, take the plane. And we like our few books autographed, because they will, one day, be worth more to our heirs and our assigns.” — William H. Gass, “The Shears of the Censor,” from Tests of Time
On sale now, at a low, low priceOn sale now, at a low, low price
“The chief mode of censorship in a commercial society is, naturally enough, the marketplace. It is not that we suppress serious books entirely. But in capitalist countries, only on the margins can excellence be located. Poetry and most significant fiction have to find a few little magazines to appear in, or an occasional small press which may be prepared to nourish them. However, those obscure mags are read only by their editors; the presses are being pennied to death; while their distributors go bankrupt.” — William H. Gass, “The Shears of the Censor,” from Tests of Time
The word is our bondThe word is our bond
“There is a bond between us, readers and writers—an ancient tie as old as writing is, if not as old as speech itself, a pact, a promise which the act of setting down sentences in a moving way implicitly solidifies—that what we shall say shall be as true to things and to our own hearts as we can manage with our skills to make them; and that what we read shall be free and unforced and uttered out of the deepest respect for the humanity all language represents, whatever its content otherwise; and that this covenant (broken tragically, every day which history has been there to mark) is the model for all exchange of thought and need and feeling, and that this community, the community of unveiled countenance and free speech, must be sustained if we are to continue, either in the harsh and unforgiving condition of survival or in terms of every genuine enterprise of the moral spirit—in short, so we can say, though we may be here by genetic accident or god’s decree, that we deserve to stay.” — William H. Gass, “Tribalism, Identity, and Ideology,” from Tests of Time
Peel me another peachPeel me another peach
“What is unthinkable? Think it. What is unutterable? Utter it. What cannot be spelled without a dash? Fill in the dashes with doubts. What is obscene? Dream it. In all its tones, in seamy detail, at indelicate length. What is too horrible to contemplate? Describe it. With cool and indifferent interest. As though peeling a peach. You will not be the first, for the unthinkable has already been thought, the unutterable uttered innumerable times, God’s various names have been taken in vain, the obscene has been enjoyed, the horrible carried out.” — William H. Gass, “The Writer and Politics: A Litany,” from Tests of Time