Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. -Einstein

The other day, while driving around the poverty laced backwoods of central Connecticut and listening to Nine Inch Nails as I am wont to do, I started thinking about what makes humans so amazing. I'm not a fan of most people, and I don't think most of them are particularly impressive - both intellectually and physically. But the kind of "amazing" I decided on is applicable to pretty much everyone.

From science to philosophy, we seek an answer to the question of what sets us apart from the rest of the animals. There's a pretty fair consensus among rational and non-combative people (so, likely not most philosophers) that we have something that goes above and beyond what animals are capable of. The simple answer is, well, "Humans can think. We have bigger brains and we're capable of cognitive functioning that entails learning and memory. Most importantly, we are the only creatures that are self-aware."

The conclusion I came to in the car (the place where I am most lucid) is that humans are unique because of our ability to change. We morph, we repair, we become damaged, we despair over the past, and we hope for the future. And all these emotions are driven by our ability to alter ourselves. We choose new clothes, ditch old friends, choose to forget the most painful memories (or perhaps replay them over and over, forcing ourselves to feel the sting of self-loathing) listen to different music. No other creature engages in these behaviors.

Not only can we do all this changing, but there is some strange property in our minds that allows for change but also never lets anything quite slip away. The Nine Inch Nails song I was so enjoying, Somewhat Damaged, used to speak to exactly everything I felt about life and myself. I really felt a connection to it. Yet somehow, the other day, I was able to appreciate and love it, but the sentiments expressed no longer exist in me actively. They're still present, and I can still remember what I felt; sometimes I still feel that way, but it's just...different. I've changed! Humans can change. It's what makes us different.

Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey was such a fantastic eccentric. He went to every performance of the NYC Ballet while Allegra Kent was a dancer there, wore floor length fur coats, and kept his empty medicine bottles on the window ledges because he thought they looked pretty with the light coming through them. I guess part of my wants to be that type of nutty, although my kind is entertaining too.

A book was written about his home, The Elephant House. I met the author at Gotham Book Mart by chance, and while clearly in awe of Gorey, I don't think his book ENTIRELY captures the author's whimsy (at least as I like to imagine it).

Today's visiting demon is the realization that I must leave Alex and beautiful California today, and face the challenge of finding a job that might actually result in a career and success. Not to mention the fear of getting back my Metaphysics paper, which might be one of the more disjointed papers I've ever turned in. It's a graduate seminar and I'm out of my element.

Funeral Blues, W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Burnt Norton (excerpt), T.S. Eliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

         A penny for the Old Guy
    
            I
        

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

        
              II
        

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

        
              III
        

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

        
              IV
        

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

        
              V
        

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

                  For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow


                  Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

                  For Thine is the Kingdom


For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Wanna know why you're fat?

The Brothers Karamazov

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky

Playboy used to have the best interviews...

Do not dwell on dreams and forget to live

Memories of warmer days...

Bronx Botanical Garden...

What a great way of putting what I thought was impossible to express clearly

I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've been depressed. I've felt awful - awful beyond all, but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me.

In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?"

Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidfy themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!

-Charles Bukowski

Prufrock distilled to its finest parts. I love T.S. Eliot

Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit.

There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me.
And time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions.

And indeed there will be time to wonder, "Do I dare?'' and, "Do I dare?''
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Should I have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.

Would it have been worth while to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball to roll it toward some overwhelming question? It is impossible to say just what I mean!

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Wuthering Heights

There's a new Wuthering Heights film adaptation coming out in 2011! It's in post-production. Directed by Andrea Arnold and starring my latest favorite young actress, Kaya Scodelario. It also features the first black Heathcliff. This is very exciting...

"The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith."

— Robert Ingersoll

Death Cab for Cutie Lyrics

I'm always on this great photo sharing website, and there are alot of cool pictures that have been combined with quotes. It's kind of like photographic versions of Quotable Cards. I love it. But there are quotes I want to see but never do, so I decided to make some of my own.

Liking what Stephen King has to say...

"If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you."

Some NIN to ponder....

What if everything around you isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know is an elaborate dream?
If you look at your reflection is it all you want it to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks?
Would you find yourself afraid to see?

What if all the world's inside of your head - just creations of your own?
Your devils and your gods, all the living and the dead, and you're really all alone?
You can live in this illusion; you can choose to believe.

Asparagus by Margaret Atwood

This afternoon a man leans over
the hard rolls and the curled
butter, and tells me everything: two
women love him, he loves them, what
should he do?

The sun
sifts down through the imperceptibly
brownish urban air. I'm going to
suffer for this: turn red, get
blisters or else cancer. I eat
asparagus with my fingers, he
plunges into description.
He's at his wit's end, sewed
up in his own frenzy. He has
breadcrumbs in his beard.
I wonder
if I should let my hair go grey
so my advice will be better.
I could wrinkle up my eyelids,
look wise. I could get a pet lizard.
You're not crazy, I tell him.
Others have done this. Me, too.
Messy love is better than none,
I guess. I'm no authority
on sane living.

Which is all true
and no hep at all, because
this form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
or what kind of screams and grimaces
it pushed you into.

The shrimp arrive on their skewers,
the courtyard trees unroll
their yellow caterpillars,
pollen powders our shoulders.
He wants them both, he relates
tortures, the coffee
arrives and altogether I am amazed
at his stupidities.

I sit looking at him
with a sort of wonder;
or is it envy?
Listen, I say to him,
you're very lucky.

The Apparition of these Faces in the Crowd... (Ezra Pound)

Considering the shockingly global economy and social world we live in today, how is it possible that so many people seem to look the same? I walk around campus and see people who look just like people I have known before. And yet, these are entirely new people in a new community.

There are specific "looks" that seem to be repeated more often than others. Horsey faces, those kinds of mouths that don't naturally close; the upper lip is always raised and the teeth exposed. Chubby girls with receding chins also seem to pop up frequently. Often these "look" types are so similar from person to person that they could be siblings.

Yes, we are all descended from some common glop of sludge, but so much change and evolution has occurred since then I wonder why we aren't more varied. It makes sense in the years before easy travel because the farthest breeding partner was usually from a couple towns over.

Is the issue just that wide spans of travel have only become possible in what is really quite recent by the standards of humanity's time-line. There just hasn't been enough time to get a higher variety of appearances.

But why do a few specific "looks" appear so often, instead of us just all looking similar? Lots of people look quite unique, but there are three or four types that I always notice.

Additionally, what is the significance of the recent discovery that some of us have Neanderthal blood running in our veins? Are these people some of the ones that look so distinct and yet similar to many others in their own set? Are all the horse faced girls the ones with Neanderthal heritage?

Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

When one woman strikes at the heart of another she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.

You see, I have no intention of breaking down her prodigiousness. I want her to believe in God and virtue and the sanctity of marriage and still not be able to stop herself. I want the excitement of watching her betray everything that's most important to her.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with. And in the end, I've distilled everything to one single principle: win or die.

-Dangerous Liasons

Another New World, Josh Ritter

Clearly I have none of my own words to share, so I'm forced to share others that I find touching.

The leading lights of the age all wondered amongst themselves what I would do next; after all that I'd found in my travels around the world was there anything left?

"Gentlemen", I said, "I've studied the maps, and if what I'm thinking is right, there's another new world at the top of the world for whoever can brave through the ice."

I looked round the room in that way I once had and I saw that they wonted belief...So I said, "All I've got are my guts and my God"...Then I paused..."and the Annabelle Lee."

Oh the Annabelle Lee, I saw their eyes shine; the most beautiful ship in the sea.
My Nina, My Pinta, My Santa Maria, my beautiful Annabelle Lee.

That spring we set sail as the crowds waved from shore and on board the crew waved their hats, but I never had family, just the Annabelle Lee, so I'd never had cause to look back.
I just set the course North and I studied the charts, and toward dark I drifted toward sleep, and I dreamed of the fine deep harbor I'd find past the ice for my Annabelle Lee.

After that it got colder the world got quiet; it was never quite day or quite night, and the sea turned the color of sky turned the color of sea turned the color of ice, 'til at last all around us was vastness, one vast glassy desert of arsenic white. The waves that once lifted us sifted instead into drifts against Annabelle's sides.

The crew gathered closer; at first for the comfort each morning would bring a new set of the tracks in the snow leading over the edge of the world... 'til I was the only one left.

After that it gets cloudy, but it feels like I lay there for days or maybe for months. But Annabelle held me, the two of us happy just to think back on all we had done. We talked of the other new worlds we'd discover; she gave up her body to me, and as I chopped up her mainsail for timber I told her of all that we still had to see.

As the frost turned her moorings to nine-tail and the wind lashed her sides in the cold, I burned her to keep me alive every night in the lover's embrace of her hold.

I won't call it "rescue" what brought me back to the old world to drink and decline, and pretend that the search for another new world was well worth the burning of mine.

But sometimes at night in my dreams comes the singing of some unknown tropical bird, and I smile in my sleep thinking Annabelle Lee has finally made it to another new world.

So Runs the World Away

This man is a poet through and through. How can any one person be so multiply gifted?


It's a hungry world out there; even the wind will take a bite. I can feel the world circling, sniffing round me in the night. The lost sheep grow teeth, forsake the lambs and lie with the lions.

The living is desperate precarious and mean and getting by is so hard that even the rocks are picked clean. The bones of small contention are the only food the hungry find; where the thistles eat the thorns and the roses have no chance. The sky's so cold and clear the stars might stick you where you stand, and you're only glad it's dark because you might see the master's hand; you might cast around forever and never find the peace you seek.

For every cry in the night somebody says, "Have faith! Be content inside your questions"
Tell me, what's the point of light when you have to strike a match to find?

So throw away those lamentations; we both know them all too well.
If there's a book of jubilations we'll have to write it for ourselves.
So come and lie beside me darling, and let's write it while we still got time.

So if you got a light, hold it high for me.
I need it bad tonight, hold it high for me in that lonesome place.
With all the hurt that I've done that can't be undone, hold it high for me.
Light and guide me through; I'll do the same for you,
Hold it high for me; I'll hold it high for you,
Because I know you've got your own valley to walk.
Though it's dark as death and then gets darker, though your path is blocked, I'll hold it high for you through the thieves and rocks and keep you safe from harm.

-Josh Ritter

What I used to be will pass away and then you'll see that all I want now is happiness for you and me. -Elliott Smith

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

-- Stephen Crane

A Poison Tree, William Blake

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

I don't think Ok Go gets enough credit for thier humorous and intelligent lyricism:

The demon's in the design; seemed like a good idea at the time. How it all went down, only Pilate knows - the only thing I ever asked of him was when the bars were closed. 

The Usual Suspects

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Yay Josh Ritter!

Seeing him May 20th...can't wait.

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike.  She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull.  She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere . . . She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.


The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found challenging; it was ineptitude-a gray spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.  She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible.  She could find no answer.


Through the years of her childhood, [she] lived in the future – in the world she expected to find, where she would not have to feel contempt or boredom. 


The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any.