Kieran > Recent Status Updates

"the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.

We had also been ordered not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could skew our observations, our superiors believed. But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Think pretty. Conceive of yourself as dashing, debonair, cool, filled with panache and aplomb. And soon the aura spreads out from inside you, and all them tender juicy items are pausing to reconsider you. Because, friends and neighbors, we live in a Time of Beautiful People. Gorgeous is revered. We can’t stand anything even remotely ordinary; it has to be young and lovely."

"At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call constantly into question the very tales we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning."

"The social theory of conspiracy, Popper says, is a consequence of the end of God as a reference point and of the consequent question, Who is there in his place? This place is now occupied by various men and powerful, sinister groups that can be blamed for having organized the Great Depression and all the evils we suffer."

"It is said that in Europe the criminal seldom repents, as the most recent theories confirm him in the notion that his crime is not a crime at all, but merely an act of revolt against an unjustly oppressive power. Society amputates him from itself by means of a power that triumphs over him quite mechanically, and accompanies this excommunication with hatred."