Noah Damski > Recent Status Updates

“We must also renounce the past and the future, for the self is nothing but a coagulation of past and future around a present which is always falling away.”

“We can offer nothing short of ourselves. Otherwise what we term our offering is merely a label attached to a compensatory assertion of the ‘I.’”

“My existence does not come from my antecedents, nor from my physical and social surroundings; it moves out toward them and sustains them. For I am the one who brings into being for myself—and thus into being in the only sense that the word could have for me.”

“I am not the result of the intertwining of multiple causalities that determine my body or my “psyche.” I cannot think of myself as a part of the world…Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless.”

Begins with elucidating how Alexander’s conquests with great speed faced the diverse religious practices of the world against each other.

I can’t tell if Sartre and Camus just wrote very similarly, or this is the result of the translations:
—
The gentleman in the gold-rimmed spectacles was looking at him. Gomez felt ashamed, as though he had spoken his thoughts out loud. The Negroes were smiling, the young woman was smiling, the driver was smiling. *Not to grin is a sin.*

“This is where we get off,” Ritchie said, smiling.

“It is horrible to see oneself die without Children. Napoleon Bonaparte said that.

What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. I said that.”

“The next time I was in Los Angeles and drove past the house it was gone, a teardown, to be replaced a year or two later by a house marginally bigger. Some years later in a Washington bookstore I met the buyer’s daughter. I grew up in your house, she said. Not exactly, I refrained from saying.”

I’m stupid, but when a book gets too long, I just get tired. I finished the earlier James Baldwin books because they were all about this length, but I’m only halfway done with this one. I’m taking a break and going back to Joan Didion.

“the secrets of everyone were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished.”

I am grateful to never experience this sort of hell. A world beaten black-and-blue.

The James Baldwin train carries on, book #4 now. He has returned to being “semi-autobiographical,” but to reflect a very different era of his life as was in “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

“The train rocked, he held me closer, and a kind of sigh I’d never heard before stifled itself in him.

It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body—the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”

“And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere.”

“Fonny loved me too much, we needed each other too much. We were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh—which meant that we so took each other for granted that we never thought the flesh.”

“By now, Mama had poured herself some gin and orange juice and was sitting at the table, opposite him. She was swinging her foot; she was thinking ahead.”

“All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain; it was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion.”

It’s nice reading this at the same time as the James Baldwin book, because they explore the same topic, but this though philosophy and the other through narration.

Courage is self-affirmation in-spite-of anxiety. Existence is being gained in-spite-of nonbeing.

Happy New Year, my dear Kindle family.

I’m not going to be able to finish this book before the New Year, bc I’ve the festivities to attend to, but man oh man, I miss reading such page-turning fiction.

“For a moment her pride stood up; the resolution that had brought her to this place tonight faltered, and she felt that if Gabriel was the Lord’s anointed, she would rather die and endure Jell for all eternity than bow before His alter.”

“His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.”

Life is the process in which the power of being actualizes itself. Anxiety is the existential awareness of one’s finitude as finitude, or the experience of man as man, so courage is self-affirmation in spite of that.

I’ve read nearly 30 books this year, I’m very proud of how much I’ve accomplished. Onto next year, where I hope I’ll dedicate myself evermore to reading.

I was not expecting this book to be good, but it has me tearing up. Thank you Tim, for sharing your life on these pages.

Im bored, and so I read, as respite from the boredom.

I’m hesitant to get into his fantasy, so I’m reading this first. Fresh, intrapersonal memoir: it’ll be a quick read.

“-which perhaps means nothing or possibly means very much.” The conjectures of this book are interesting, but damn does Freud like to make absolute conclusions based on possibilities.

“He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady everytime I ever went on the air again.”

“You either take to somebody or you don’t. If you do, then you do all the talking and nobody can even get a word in edgewise. If you don’t like somebody—which is most of the time—then you just sit around like death itself and let the person talk themself into a hole.”