jude > Recent Status Updates

Any piece of time is lonely and pale in isolation, and moments resemble other moments, so that sometimes you feel that you are a memory being called to mind by someone else.

Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening. I thought about my patients with abusive families who kept going back to be hurt again. Are traumatized people condemned to seek refuge in what is familiar? If so, why, and is it possible to help them become attached to places and activities that are safe and pleasurable?

For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

There is nothing wrong with a science before the foundations are laid.

Just as speech is not essential in religion, so words cannot be essential to revealing what is true, or deep, in metaphysics.

He himself once wrote: 'I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written as a poetic composition.'

"My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language."

Cartesian dualism is bad ontology but superb economics, transforming the body into an asset available for technical and commercial development, while abstracting the subject from specific corporeal realization, transplanting it into contractual formality.

It was folded by cunning, sealed by crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art?

[V]alorizing the agrarian hoplite phalanx also provided a potent ideological tool for internal political struggles. In the late fifth century, Athenian elites looked back to a fictitious ‘‘ancestral constitution’’ [...] to critique the perceived failures of Athenian government. [...] The creation of a hoplite ideology may thus stand as the first important socio-military development of the Classical period.

For the very first time, life has become aware of itself, and we are the conscious vessels of that remarkable development.

"[P]oliticizing an academic discipline like sociology or literary criticism [...] is every bit as much an attack on the Constitution of Knowledge as is, say, banning the teaching of evolution or propagating fake science about vaccines."

this is quite frankly a bizarre take given the sheer politics within the two disciplines mentioned. is he doing a bit? is he?

Stern: There you go again with "meaning." I gave up meaning a long time ago. Trying to get a table at Elaine’s is hard enough. [Pause] What do you think it means?

Hector, I cannot forget. Talk not to me of bargains. Lions and men make no truce, wolves and lambs have no friendship—they hate each other forever. So there can be no love between you and me; and there shall be no truce for us, until one of the two shall fall and glut Arês with his blood.

He that fights and will not run may live to see another sun; he that runs and will not fight is bound to die—and serves him right!

HYLAS. Truly my opinion is, that all our opinions are alike vain and uncertain. What we approve today, we condemn tomorrow. We keep a stir about knowledge, and spend our lives in the pursuit of it, when, alas! we know nothing all the while: nor do I think it possible for us ever to know anything in this life. Our faculties are too narrow and too few. Nature certainly never intended us for speculation.

Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused. It is nothing strange that tenets, which in themselves are ever so different, should nevertheless be confounded with each other by those who do not consider them attentively.

And yet this secret, like the dove, eludes us, and we never know where it is. The dove is there to signify that the world speaks in hieroglyphics, and there is a hieroglyph that itself signifies hieroglyphics. And a hieroglyph does not say and does not conceal; it simply shows.

And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

The only mystery in the universe
Is that there’s a mystery of the universe.

Myth is the nothing that is everything.
The very sun that breaks through the skies
Is a bright and speechless myth—
God’s dead body,
Naked and alive.

My only displeasure will be
The continual one of living,
Since the days pass and what’s hoped for
Still doesn’t come, and it’s nothing.

Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature,
Because yesterday’s Nature isn’t Nature.
What was is nothing, and to remember is not to see.

And so the three of us go along whatever road we find,
Leaping and singing and laughing
And enjoying our shared secret
Of knowing that in all the world
There is no mystery
And that everything is worthwhile

To think about God is to disobey God,
Since God wanted us not to know him,
Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us . . .

I am oppressed by strange thoughts and dark sensations; throngs of vague questions obsess me, but I have neither the strength nor the desire to cope with them.

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

He could reason; he could read, Dante, for example, quite easily… he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then—that he could not feel.