Tag Archives: Quotable

Nothing Really Has A Name

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“Your life began with a kind of singularity. A personal Big Bang. Without warning, you emerged from unconsciousness into a sea of light, color, smell, faces, feelings, and other completely unexpected phenomena, and there was nothing to do but attempt to navigate it. It was the ultimate “cold open” – no context, no explanation, just things happening.”

“You can learn to see that mysteriousness in the world again, on purpose. You can practice looking at what’s in front of you as an infant might see it. It’s all just textures and feelings, that have no real names and carry no explanation. Looking at the world like that comes with a certain kind of relief to the compulsive mapper, because what’s right in front of you is never as busy as the map. […] It comes down to just looking — seeing what’s there, and nothing else, as you once did.”

Nothing Really Has A Name by David Cain

The Kekulé Problem

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“The Kekulé Problem” is a 2017 nonfiction essay by writer Cormac McCarthy for the Santa Fe Institute. It was his first published work of nonfiction. He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, “is a machine for operating an animal” and that “all animals have an unconscious.” McCarthy goes on to postulate that language is purely a human cultural creation, and not a biologically determined phenomenon. (Wikipedia)

“You may have read a thousand books and be able to discuss any one of them without remembering a word of the text.”

“The unconscious wants to give guidance to your life in general but it doesn’t care what toothpaste you use.”

“The unconscious seems to know a great deal. What does it know about itself? Does it know that it’s going to die? What does it think about that?”

The essay checked a lot of my boxes: awareness, consciousness, ego, thoughts.

Down-and-out and lonely

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“It’s [hard] to get a man to understand something, when his community and identity depends on his not understanding it. […] Instead of tie-dyed shirts, they donned red “MAGA” hats. Instead of being young adventurers running away from their parents, these “front-row Joes” (as he calls them) tended to be people who were “retired or close to it” and “estranged from their families or otherwise without children”; they also had “plenty of time on their hands.” What they found was that “Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer.” His rallies gave them a “reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married—and later divorced—by Trump’s second year in office. […] Trump’s status as both a “rock star” and, simultaneously, a persecuted victim made him an attractive leader for this kind of movement.”

How Trumpists Prey on Loneliness, and Loneliness Preys on Trumpists

“It’s too late”

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AL.com: Dr. Brytney Cobia said all but one of her COVID patients in Alabama did not receive the vaccine. The vaccinated patient, she said, just needed a little oxygen and is expected to fully recover. Some of the others are dying. In Alabama, state officials report 94% of COVID hospital patients and 96% of Alabamians who have died of COVID since April were not fully vaccinated.

“One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late. I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same.”

“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.”

Patina

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“She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality.”

— Zero History (William Gibson)

Cult of Ignorance

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“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means the “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

— Isaac Asimov

The tofu of cursing

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“They weren’t loud people and didn’t even sound all that angry, really. This was just the way they spoke, the verbal equivalent of their everyday china. Among company, the wife might remark that she felt a slight chill, but here that translated to “I am fucking freezing.”

“Me too,” her husband said. “It’s cold as shit in here.” Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit.”

— The Best of Me (David Sedaris)

From Carl Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip

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“Tool stood six three and weighed 280 pounds and owned a head like a cinder block. His upper body was matted so heavily with hair that he perspired copiously, even in cold weather, and found it uncomfortable to wear a shirt. Nearly a year had passed since Tool had been shot in broad daylight by a poacher who had mistaken him for a bear. No entry wound had been visible, as the slug had uncannily tunneled into the seam of Tool’s formidable buttocks. Because bleeding was minimal, he elected to forgo medical treatment—a decision that would come back to haunt him.”

— Skinny Dip (Carl Hiaasen)