Chandler Webster > Recent Status Updates

“There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It's just that there's no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind."

“You’re still young. You suffer from the… sweet delusion that anything… really matters.”

“He had worried about being embarrassed because he might overreact to some perceived, perhaps misperceived threat. How much more embarrassing to have missed all clues, to have wandered through this violent, kinetic world with a babe's wide-eyed innocence and trust, to have ascribed innocence and decency when he should have seen duplicity and iniquity.”

I won’t stop with the Banks spam. His prose is too good.

“And to be human, to be anything like human, is to know what one lacks, to know what one needs, to know what one must look for to find some semblance of completeness amongst strangers, all alone in the darkness.”

“And off the fabulous spread of their forces had gone, under banners of bright cloth and cloud-white steam, with many a clank and hiss and whiny and roar and rattle and cheer, all bound for glory…”

“I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature…”

“Why, it’s dark author, of course, and his libertine contemporaries, whose lust-blushes fired, not at heaving bosoms, but at the silken rustle of ink-wet page proofs, the rhythmic, stallion groans of the printing press, and the spear-thrust conga out a well-proved thesis.”

😂

“I am sorry, reader. I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.”

“All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”

“They were remote and unreachable, insulated from the cries of the displaced in the streets, invulnerable to any political pressure from below. And that was precisely how it was meant to work.”

“All you can do, Rosemary—all any of us can do—is work to be something positive instead. That is a choice that every sapient must make every day of their life. The universe is what we make of it. It’s up to you to decide what part you will play.”

Almost at the finish line 😅

“Today, British apologists defend colonialism in India and intervention in China on the basis that it brought 'development' to these regions. But the evidence we have suggests exactly the opposite story. It was the colonial period of forced market integration that inaugurated the 'development gap' between Britain and Asia.”

“Without the ecological windfall from the slave colonies, Europe would not have been able to shift its economic capacity towards industrialization.”

“Poor countries don’t need our aid; they need us to stop impoverishing them. Until we target the structural drivers of global poverty - the underlying architecture of wealth extraction and accumulation - development efforts will continue to fail, decade after decade.”

“Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.”

“A boy lost light-years from home, abandoned by his parents, on an adventure that had become a nightmare for too many months.”

“Where we are now, this is what our ancestors thought was heaven. Now I can look out from their heaven and see where our future lies. Do you not think that’s a thing of glory?”

“How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?”

“Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”

“But now she stood under a tall violet sky on the surface of a petrified black ocean, all new, all strange; it was absolutely impossible to compare it to anything she had seen before; and all of a sudden, the past sheered away in her head and she turned in circles like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy, without a thought in her head.”

“…all the young people on Earth, and all the generations of humans in the centuries to come, and all their cousin creatures on the planet who could never speak for themselves, especially in court — all these living beings added up to something like a poor and vulnerable developing nation… these new citizens were young and weak… and yet they had rights too…”

“People who have it all, who don’t want anything, they’re lost. If you want something and your work gets you closer to it, that’s the only happiness.”

“The pursuit,” he said.

“Yes. The pursuit of happiness is the happiness.”

“Because money ruled the world, these people ruled the world. They were the world’s rulers, in some very real sense. Bankers. Non-democratic, answerable to no one. The technocratic elite at its most elite: financiers.”

“Fuck Margaret Thatcher… and I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the tap runs dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure.”

“But then also there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. The evil work had been their lives’ project, and while pursuing that project, they had prospered and lived in luxury. They wrecked the world happily, thinking they were supermen, laughing at the weak…”

“Was that fatuous? As absurd as insisting that every room full of monkeys really did type the complete works of Shakespeare—they just happened to put the letters in a slightly different order? As ludicrous as claiming that every large-enough quantity of rock contained Michaelangelo’s David … not in any mere latent form … but solely by virtue of the potential redefinition of the coordinates of space-time?”

“Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.”

“Really?”

“People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society, and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days of the year and then had an allocation of days they could take off, having saved up enough exchange collateral—“

“Money. Technical term.”

🥲

“Between one step and the next, he'd had an epiphany about the vastness and strangeness of the universe and his place in it. The insignificance of one boy on a strange planet in the vastness of galaxies. For a moment, his mind had reached out to the farthest ends of the universe, and he'd felt the weight of his life, his ego, his struggles as less than a feather.”

"Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways."