Elevens
So much farther left to climb: Not one inch has been secure. I’m feeling for a hand to hold me now: Live to feel and endure.1 With Honor : This Is Our Revenge : Elevens↩
Smite Us For Our Iniquities
The same man who slays his brother while caught up in the self-sustaining and ever-increasing ecstacy of violence then asks compassion of those who would slay him out of that selfsame bloodlust — and when this compassion will be denied him, he finds a way to make victims of the innocent to save his life. [...]
Quote Of The Day
Manny Fernandez: Yea I love reading Jocelyn’s blog. Manny Fernandez: It’s like a newpaper about the terrible shit for people you don’t like.1 Manny Fernandez : IM Conversation : January 8, 2005↩
Simplemindedness
It is clear that simplemindedness can make us hateful bigots, but it is less clear that it can also make us overly compassionate and overly forgiving dolts. Our inability as a culture to realize that a fundamentally bad and cowardly man might nevertheless have qualities we admire — qualities like charitableness or the ability to [...]
The Sickness Of Capitalism
The sickness of capitalism is that for many wealth is a dream and not a necessity sought out of pragmatism — that it is an end rather than a means and hence always pursued in excess. This is how the American dream became a nightmare.
Prostitution
For those who would understand the character of the Spanish people, the most telling event in my memory is also the most absurd. When a series of public announcements that were put out by the government in hopes of lessening the amount of prostitution in Spain began to have their intended effect, the prostitutes of [...]
Shakespeare
Here is a radical notion: Shakespeare was the greatest philosopher the world has yet had. There are really two radical points in this statement. First, there is the implicit belief that within Shakespeare’s thousand characters — each distinct and vibrant — we can discern a single image of life. And then there is another thought: [...]
To Have Scaled A Thousand Hours
To have scaled a thousand hours and found only torn flesh, To have grasped for stars and won only hands full of air – This is horror; This is despair.
Stale, Flat And Unprofitable
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden, That grows [...]
Sympathy
To expect sympathy from others is a sin; to deny it when offered, a virtue. And we should look upon all those who ask for our sympathy as upon sinners — as irredeemably selfish.