John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Infatuation is a hope, but love is simply a fact. And thus it is that infatuation always seems wonderful while love may seem as much a chain as a bond.

The world becomes ever more homogenous day by day: now in the Port Authority, the very same four chime notes ring out to draw one’s attention to what is said over the public address loudspeaker system as in Madrid. And immediately upon hearing them, I hear the words “Metro de Madrid informa” spoken in my head.

I think the comparison of Houellebecq to Camus is unfair to Houellebecq. While it may be said fairly that Houellebecq’s characters are basically ciphers, at least they are ciphers, which makes them at the very least reflections of some living human being. Camus’s characters, such as those in The Stranger, are not even that much. The Stranger is an Existentialist morality play.

John Myles White: So it’ll be a night to remember.
Adam Sahlin: Haha.
Adam Sahlin: If it actually happens, which it probably won’t.
John Myles White: Yeah.
Adam Sahlin: But if it does, I’ll hit dudes with chairs.¹

1. Conversation On AIM With Adam Sahlin↩

One of the great good fortunes of life is how much more clearly we remember first kisses than last kisses.

Amor es más que un juego o un diluvio
es el cuerpo y el alma a la intemperie
pero si se va la lujuria ya no vuelve.¹

1. Mario Benedetti : Peros : La Vida Es Ese Paréntesis↩

Perhaps the saddest of all moments are those in which we are forced to admit that this may well be the best of all possible worlds.

During my first trip to Paris, I found myself intimidated by everyone’s sense of composure. I was amazed at how people—who didn’t otherwise seem crazy—talked to themselves. Someone explained the European psyche; they have a developed capacity to “converse” with themselves. Now, I wonder if that confidence, that ability to reckon with one’s own soul, is something Americans lack. We compulsively look to media, to society, to our partners for our own self-esteem, without ever stopping to wonder how our self-worth ended up in someone else’s hands.

We in the New World are rookies of sorts. Human beings elsewhere seem more aware and less terrified of the fact that a person is born alone and dies alone—as though people become accustomed to that notion after many hundreds of years of civilization. We Americans are like a senior class about to graduate into the real world, socially green enough to think we’ll all be friends forever and that nothing will change.¹

This section (like much of the content of the article) is the product of naïvete taken to the point of madness about the differences between Europe and America. Humans are not so different from one another between any two countries; insofar as such differences exist, they exist within cultures (in my mind largely for genetic reasons) rather that between cultures.

No one who had lived in Europe for even a short time would make these sorts of points. It would probably suffice simply to have read recent works of European fiction or a French newspaper to see the absurdity of thinking our sense of the world (exemplified, as in the rest of the article, in our sexual mores) can be so different from place to place.

Or, if our sexual mores are so different, perhaps my Spanish friends are right to say about Americans: “sois todas zorras.”

1. An Article On MSN Entitled “French Men Don’t Get Caught”↩

Not a second marriage, but remarriage, is the triumph of hope over experience.

Like the blind men of legend who each held onto a different part of an elephant, each of us sees but a small part of the world and understands only little of that small amount he sees. The nature of life, though, compels man to make sense of the world, and so he must assume that there is a single reality behind these isolated impressions and that all his impressions are but intimations of this single, coherent reality. But he goes too far in this and defiles his experiences by combining them into a system of thought, enforcing unity where there is discord and filling in what he has not seen with what the repeated image of what he has seen. Rather than build a system upon simple — and simplistic — axioms, the philosopher does better to put down only what he has seen as faithfully as he can, so as to provide generations to come with the small insights and unpretentious laws which he has been able to infer, for it is within no one’s ability to construct a theory of everything.