Alfreien > Recent Status Updates

“That which is incomplete can’t help but seem modern.”

“As he hurried to banish from his mind merely dutiful concern for this reticent, precocious, bothersome child, this boy whom he didn’t really love, Ryuji managed to convince himself that he was brimming with genuine fatherly affection. It”

“And it proved that Ryuji had been right to take off half a day in order to amuse Noboru and his friends. Right, he knew, in terms of a father’s moral obligation. Most books and magazines would agree. ”

“Noboru had a pleasant vision of the lightning in the adults’ gaze illuminating the life on shore that Ryuji dreamed about and Fusako’s wholesome household as they crashed noisily into rubble—but his excitement had led him to overestimate the power of his imagination. He had been expecting an impassioned reaction.”

“She had been quick to interpret the reality, and inasmuch as her banal interpretation was the cause of all her agitation, no clever excuse from him would be to any purpose.”

“Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

“Nor had he mentioned his concept of ideal love: a man encounters the perfect woman only once in a lifetime and in every case death interposes—an unseen Pandarus—and lures them into the preordained embrace”

(2/?)

this seems like an overly idealistic perspective. the government produces goods, too, the distinction being that they’re non-excludable. but can’t the same be said for institutions that sell goods necessary for human life, such as grocery stores?

similarly to governments, other institutions are self-serving. a thief would not be permitted to steal goods merely because the government does not exist.

(1/2)

“While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.”

“Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.”

will have to see if this definition is sensible

“If you are bound by your past hour, if you must babble today because you babbled yesterday, if you cannot transform yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered to slavery and benumbed.”

“The conscious experience is not merely wedded to the word, but is consumed by it.”

“We may recall the examples of it which Spieth adduces: water found by a thirsty person, a termite mound that hides and saves someone, any new object that inspires a man with sudden terror-all these are transformed directly into gods.”

“The aim of theoretical thinking, as we have seen, is primarily to deliver the contents of sensory or intuitive experience from the isolation in which they originally occur. It causes these contents to transcend their narrow limits, combines them with others, compares them, and concatenates them in a definite order, in an all-inclusive context.”

“For all the concepts of theoretical knowledge constitute merely an upper stratum of logic which is founded upon a lower stratum, that of the logic of language.”

“All theoretical cognition takes its departure from a world already preformed by language; the scientist, the historian, even the philosopher, lives with his objects only as language presents them to him.”

gf took my bookmark out gotta remember

During his boyhood, he would describe Kircheis’s hair according to his whim: whenever they were quarreling—a state that never lasted very long—he would say mean things like, “What’s with that red hair? It looks like blood.” Then after they made up, he would praise it, calling it “really pretty, like a burning flame. (2/2)

Reinhard stretched out his long, supple fingers and playfully tugged at his best friend’s hair, as red as if dyed with molten rubies. Reinhard would do this sort of thing from time to time when no one else was around. (1/2)

My God died young. Theolatry I found Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me And how my childish palate loved the taste Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!

“Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one's attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author.”

D.H. Lawrence says of love: "We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. ... The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish."

“Moral people skimmed off the best tat trom religion, ate it themselves, and are now laving a tough job to get rid of the resulting scrofula.”

Whether a poor fool of the insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is God the Father, Emperor of Japan, the Holy Spirit, or whatnot, or whether a citizen in comfortable circumstances conceives that it is his mission to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous man - both these are one and the same "fixed idea."

Take notice how a ‘moral man’ behaves, who today often thinks he is through with God and throws off Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him whether he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that monogamy is the truth of marriage, that hlial piety is a sacred duty, then a moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one's being allowed to touch his sister as wife also

Whether a poor fool of the insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is God the Father, Emperor of Japan, the Holy Spirit, or whatnot, or whether a citizen in comfortable circumstances conceives that it is his mission to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous man - both these are one and the same "fixed idea."

“Years of secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control.”

alright humbert

In other words, what they're putting on the canvas isn't what the objects look like, it's how the objects feel. If you believe that drawing pictures is a form of personal expression, then I think that's the correct way to do it. If you think about it like that, a drawing that looks just like a photograph isn't a good drawing at all, is it?"

“With the animal, present suffering, even if repeated countless times, remains what it was the first time: it cannot sum itself up.”

“A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.”