Heart of Darkness

“Yes, egoism is good, and altruism is good, and fidelity to nature would be the best of all … if we could only get rid of consciousness. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well - but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife - the tragedy begins. We can’t return to nature, since we can’t change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity … There is no morality, no knowledge, and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that … is always but a vain and floating appearance.”

-- Joseph Conrad

[Source: Thomas Ligotti, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”]

David Foster Wallace Gets Kafka

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"It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humour but that we’ve taught them to see humour as something you get – the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke – that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t ‘get’ Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along."

-- David Foster Wallace

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T. S. Eliot

“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.”

-- T. S. Eliot

Falstaff

Pop has gone to visit Falstaff. He has mentioned him a couple of times over the last few weeks. It surprises me. It had been so long since I have heard a word about him; I assumed they were estranged, that Falstaff grew bored with him. Apparently not. I wonder if the blustery big guy has mellowed in his old age, not that I really want to see for myself. My life is a lot more peaceful without that yelling and swaggering.

Pests

I am reminded that one of the disadvantages of these wonderful in-between seasons, when the days are neither too hot nor too cold, is that the bugs are out in full force. I go outside for two minutes to take out the trash and refresh the cats' water, and my legs are half-eaten with ugly, swollen bites all over.

Democracy

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Democracy appears when some large number of previously excluded, ordinary persons - what the eighteenth century called “the many” - secure the power not simply to select their governors but to oversee the institutions of government. Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. It must always be fought for by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power, and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens, and continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.

-- Sean Wilentz, “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”

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