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I don't know if you know what it is like to want to be someone else, to not want to look like you look, to hate your own face and to go completely unnoticed. I have always wanted to be someone else. I have never felt comfortable the way I am. All I want is to be better than myself, to become less ordinary and to find some purpose in this world. It is easier to see things in others, to see things you admire and then try and become that. To own a different face, to dance a different dance, and sing a different song. It is out there waiting for us, inviting us to change. It is time to become who we are not. To change our face and become who we want to be. I think the world is a better place that way.
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Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Excerpt from William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950Comment
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Why do human beings expect an end of the world at all? And if this is conceded to them, why must it be a terrible end?- Immanuel Kant
ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδαComment
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"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away." - Walter Benjamin"He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."Comment
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A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.Comment
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"I found in my memory rigidly fixed words, expressions, verses that, like a malleable mass that has later cooled and hardened, preserve in me the imprint of the collision between a larger collective and myself. Just as a certain kind of significant dream survives awakening in the form of words when all the rest of the dream content has vanished, here isolated words have remained in place as marks of catastrophic encounters." - Walter Benjamin"He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."Comment
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I'm a fan of Stanley Kubricks work.
Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?
Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.
Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality.
As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan.
Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.
The most terrifying fact of the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
– Stanley Kubrick, Playboy Interview with Eric Nordern, September 1968
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The progressive development of man
is vitally dependent on invention.
Its ultimate purpose is
the complete mastery of mind
over the material world,
the harnessing of the forces
of nature to human needs.
Nikola Tesla, 1919Comment
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"Do what you love, then find someone who will pay you to do it."Comment
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"To feel everything in fine detail makes us indifferent, save towards what we can't obtain: sensations our soul is still too embryonic to grasp, human activities congruent with feeling things deeply, passions and emotions lost among more visible kinds of achievement." - Fernando Pessoa
This fragment, like many of Pessoa's, tends a little too far towards inaction for my taste and strikes me as a copout. I'm posting a bastardized version, where "more visible kinds of achievement" are to be read as non-artistic (or rushed artistic) endeavors.
(Open note to the impressive yet notoriously unproductive Aitour Throup: for the sake of those who love your work, do not read Pessoa... )"He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."Comment
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words of a feather
some aphorisms extracted from one of my favourite novels, NIGHTWOOD, by Djuna Barnes
You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pate; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.
Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven.
Even the contemplative life is only an effort to hide the body so the feet won't stick out.
she was also, from the one or two pics i can find, a bit of a dandy!
ain't no beauty queens in this localityComment
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"But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road – there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt."
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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sain't
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Such a wonderful photo, thank you for posting it!Originally posted by MJRH View Post.
sain't
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I'm sure interest1 has posted this before in here, but I think it's worth revisiting:
"Life is nothing if you're not obsessed." - John WatersComment
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^^^ “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” -Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
much as i love John Waters, i'll take Pooh's advice over his
Originally posted by interest1 View Post
but a small repayment, for your photographic contributions
ain't no beauty queens in this localityComment
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