The Happy Nihilist

some spurious vegetable torpor

Knowing how easily even the smallest things torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with them. A cloud passing in front of the sun is enough to make me suffer, how then should I not suffer in the darkness of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life?

My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.

To me the four walls of my miserable room are both prison cell and far horizon, both bed and coffin. My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lost myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

I never had anyone I could call 'Master.' No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to enlighten my soul.

 

The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail Classics) by Fernando Pessoa p. 50 [This British edition and translation is far superior to the one from Penguin in the US.]

Nests of time

WHEN I SPEAK OF A NEST OF TIME, I mean any frequently repeated experience whose unique dynamics, intensity of involvement and regular length wall it off from other experiences and so establish a discrete psychological environment. While we habitually seek out nests in space, areas for privacy or intimacy or repose, we are relative novices in establishing these temporal havens, and slow in realizing that free space is useless without uncluttered time. Indeed, a nest of time need not require a special place at all: its only two requirements are that it concern some desirable activity and that it be, barring emergencies, inviolable. A writer sits down to work. It is nine in the morning, and the next four hours are free, just as they have been the day before and will be the day after, by his express decision and unequivocal need. He looks down those four hours as down a clear view of unencumbered space; more broadly, the regular work periods of the future open up like a long bright hallway of work in freedom. He has no need to fear a wasted hour, an unproductive day, and conversely he has no time-related excuse for sloth or failure. Two lovers meet each evening from five until seven. Their activities vary but their intimacy does not. Whatever else they do during the day is redeemed by this period. A man goes jogging regularly, through the countryside or a park, for forty minutes. The stress of running is sufficient to make it the only thing he thinks of. Yet immediately beneath his awareness of the present, in the familiar landmarks and the familiar stresses, is the sense that he has done this before and will do this again, that he characteristically wills to do it, that in doing it he enters and enlarges a part of himself which is unavailable to him at other times. Such periods unify us, concentrating our energy, judgment and emotion upon a single point. Conversely, they relieve us from all other considerations and so give us profound refreshment. They give us, if temporarily, ourselves. They are true acts of freedom, compared with which our normal miscellaneous diversions and indulgences of impulse are like the flutterings of moths.

 

Time and the Art of Living by Robert Grudin p. 92

Wisdom

There once was a man (reputed to be the wisest in the world) who, although living to an untold age, confined his reaching to the one word of advice: "Endure!" At length a rival arose and challenged him to a debate which took place before a large assembly. "You say 'Endure,'" cried the rival sage, "but I don't want to endure. I wish to love and to be loved, to conquer and create. I wish to know what is right, then do it and be happy." There was no reply from his opponent, and, on looking more closely at the old creature, his adversary found him to consist of an odd-shaped rock on which had taken root a battered thorn that presented, by an optical illusion, the impression of hair and a beard. Triumphantly he pointed out the mistake to the authorities, but they were not concerned. "Man or rock," they answered, "what does it matter?" And at that moment the wind, reverberating through the sage's moss-grown orifice, repeated with a hollow sound: "Endure!"

p. 53

 

The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus by Cyril Connoly

the debris of a universe in ruins

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

“A Free Man’s Worship” by Bertrand Russell

Gene Roddenberry, ethical slut

"...and within the bounds of what it takes to maintain a happy marriage, it's what I do. I practice what I preach. There may be times when I feel like 'dipping my wick' and I do so. When it's right. When it feels good. People may say, 'Oh that Gene Roddenberry. He's no good. He's an unfaithful husband.' I say unfaithful to what?"

"Majel [your wife], surely."

"No. Not at all. People aren't concerned in their deepest selves about Majel. They're concerned about themselves, their rules and so on. They mean I am unfaithful to the ideal, their ideal, of marriage. They don't want to consider another idea. They may be afraid. They may condemn me for breaking a vow they think I made. Whereas in fact, I didn't make it. I could never adhere to an agreement that deprived me of myself. Majel and I have our own agreement. I would be false, a false person, if I did make any other kind of agreement. And I would be a false person if my wife didn't know who I am, what I do."

Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation by Yvonne Fern

See also The Ethical Slut.

Sidney Morgenbesser to BF Skinner

Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?

[wikipedia on Morgenbesser]

LAFORGE: What is it that you want in a man?

GUINAN: Me personally?

LAFORGE: As a woman. What's the first thing you look at?

GUINAN: His head.

LAFORGE: His mind. Of course.

GUINAN: No, his head. I'm attracted to bald men.

LAFORGE: Seriously?

GUINAN: Seriously.

LAFORGE: Why?

GUINAN: Maybe because a bald man was very kind to me once when I was hurting. Took care of me.

Hermeneutics of Her Madge

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic. Actually, she had heard this phrase, the republic of letters, used before, at graduation ceremonies, honorary degrees and the like, though without knowing quite what it meant. At that time talk of a republic of any sort she had thought mildly insulting and in her actual presence tactless, to say the least. It was only now she understood what it meant. Books did not defer. All readers were equal, and this took her back to the beginning of her life. As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognised with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognised.

The Uncommon Reader: A Novella by Alan Bennett

“that simple little moment of contact”

This to me is the single most meaningful moment in all of cinema, a wholesale justification for the existence of the medium.

 

 

It’s important to situate this scene in its context:

Sandy is shot by a fan. Cut to hospital.

NURSE It's a shame. Poor fool. He's dead, and he never really found out the meaning of life.

At a memorial service.

PSYCHOANALYST I treated him. He was a complicated patient. He saw reality too clearly--faulty denial mechanism, failed to block out the terrible truths of existence. In the end, his inability to push away the awful facts of being in the world rendered his life meaningless. Or, as one great Hollywood producer said: too much reality is not what the people want. Sandy Bates suffered a depression common to many artists in middle age. In my latest paper for the Psychoanalytic Journal, I have named it Ozymandius melancholia.

Applause.

MC Well, Sandy Bates' works will live on after him.

SHADE OF SANDY Yeah, but what good is it if I can't pinch any women or hear any music?

MC And now in his classic scene from his Academy Award winning motion picture,

SHADE OF SANDY I would trade that Oscar for one more second of life.

MC He deals with the subject of immortality, a subject that plagued him.

Accepting posthumous award.

SANDY Some time ago, I had a love affair that ended sort of unhappily, and just a little while back, just before I died, in fact, I was on the operating table and I was searching to try and find something to hang onto, you know, because when you're dying your life suddenly really does become really authentic, and I was reaching for something to give my life meaning, and a memory flashed through my mind.

“Stardust” playing in the background.

SANDY It was one of those great spring days, a Sunday, and boy you knew summer would be coming soon. I remember that morning Dorrie and I had gone for a walk in the Park. We came back to the apartment, we're just sort of sitting around, and I put on a record of Louis Armstrong, which is music that I grew up loving. It was very, very pretty. And I happened to glance over, and I saw Dorrie sitting there. And I remember thinking to myself how terrific she was and how much I loved her. And, I don't know, I guess it was the combination of everything--the sound of the music, and the breeze, and how beautiful Dorrie looked to me--and for one brief moment, everything just seemed to come together perfectly, and I felt happy, almost indestructible in a way. It's funny, that's simple little moment of contact moved me in a very, very profound way.

Happy Captain Picard Day

Captain Picard Day is celebrated on June 16th because it is the equivalent date to Stardate 47457.1, mentioned in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled The Pegasus. In that episode, Captain Picard Day is an occasion for the Enterprise to host schoolchildren and show them what Starfleet is like. [geeksaresexy.net]

 

 

The Stardate 47457.1 is generally agreed by most Star Trek scholars to correspond to the old Terran Gregorian calendar date of June 16.

Darwinian epistemology

We swim in a sea of bogus narratives, attempting to carve meaning out of the purposeless and accidental—talking a great deal, but rarely having insight into our own true motives or any genuine links of cause and effect in the world around us.

The voice in your head exists because a long lineage of voices in heads very like it, stretching gradually back into prehistory, helped your particular line of ancestors to spawn a slightly larger progeny than the more taciturn primates down the road. That voice doesn't exist to help you discover truth. (As you may have noticed, most of what it tells you—like most of what the people around you say—is merely counterfactual, self-serving, platitudinous wish-thinking.)

As indeed with all aspects of your brain and body, your experience of mind and your internal narrative exist solely to help the molecules in your cells to make copies of themselves. It may be a happy accident of evolution that we can discipline those verbal faculties into reason and logic, which help us grasp (however feebly, tentatively and imperfectly) at truths about the world around us, but this does not necessarily come naturally, and it certainly isn't inevitable.

A bird perched on a tree branch is constantly being blown up and down, to and fro, and its retinal images seesaw accordingly. It is like living through a permanent earthquake. Birds keep their heads, and hence their view of the world, steady by diligent use of the neck muscles. If you film a bird on a windblown branch, you can almost imagine that the head is nailed to the background, while the neck muscles use the head as a fulcrum to move the rest of the body. When a bird walks, it employs the same trick to keep its perceived world steady. That is why walking chickens jerk their heads back and forth in what can seem to us quite a comical fashion. It is actually rather clever. As the body moves forward, the neck draws the head backwards in a controlled way so that the retinal images remain steady. Then the head shoots forward to allow the cycle to repeat. I can't help wondering whether, as an untoward consequence of the bird way of doing things, a bird might be unable to see a real earthquake because its neck muscles would automatically compensate.

Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder By Richard Dawkins

In the system that I commend, men are freed, it is true, from the duty of sexual conjugal fidelity, but they have in exchange the duty of controlling jealousy. The good life cannot be lived without self-control, but it is better to control a restrictive and hostile emotion such as jealousy, rather than a generous and expansive emotion such as love. Conventional morality has erred, not in demanding self-control, but in demanding it in the wrong place.

Marriage and Morals (1929) by Betrand Russell

They are born meat, and they die meat.

the haphazard, amoral processes inherent in nature itself

 

While acknowledging that the Morgenstern family no longer has a home, authorities said it really makes no sense to bemoan this fact, as things like this happen every day, and it's no use trying to pretend that, in and of itself, existence is anything but a provisional circumstance over which we exert limited control.

Though the cause of the fire remains unknown, and can perhaps never truly be known, sources close to the investigation said that no foul play is suspected, only the haphazard, amoral processes inherent in nature itself.

"The house will be rebuilt, or perhaps it won't," Farber said of the destruction. "Perhaps an entirely new building will be built there, one that's not even a house. Or maybe it will remain a vacant lot, and a tree will grow there, and some day, long after I and everyone I know has died, young children will come here and play in its branches."

“Existentialist Firefighter Delays 3 Deaths,” The Onion