I have said that language bears special responsibilities: The writer’s vigilance over language and attention to language are themselves an assumption of responsibility. When, with the Renaissance drama, men and women began to speak—through literature—with individual voices, rather than as types (as they had done in medieval morality plays), there was a humanistic assumption of personal accountability for what was uttered. And so we have continued, in theory at least, to regard it. Our words, whether in literature or in life, are accepted as a revelation of our private nature, and an index of the measure of responsibility we are prepared to assume for it.
— Shirley Hazzard, “We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think”
You will assume you know the motives, the history, the anatomy of the relationships.
You will be wrong.Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge ...
Nidky Nezabuni Tvar (Never Forget A Face)
Ours is a world in which the human and the nonhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. We live, in short, in Philip K. Dick’s future, not Orwell’s or Huxley’s... May those wicked bones be broken as often as the Ten Commandments
“It was a departure of foreboding, like the eerie silence that precedes a coming storm.”“Eerie silence” is a cliché, and “coming” is redundant ... Butt one must read between the Feb appointments - Backscratching on steroids in Our Time
“They call them creative. Baloney. The inventor of the corkscrew was creative. The irony of leadership – a communications business – is that they treat words with little Orwellean respect, often devaluing their meaning. The all-new Reinvented Car. Really? Five wheels this time?’
“It’s clear that I’ve been double-crossed / It’s clear that I’ve been framed”
~ MP
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. The World English Bible translates the passage as: You hypocrite! Translated into Bohemian
"You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
Just as each latitudional tribe marked its arrows in a distinctive way, so each had a particular style of scalping: diamond-shaped, triangular, square, oval. Former staffer observed in his secret memoirs that when the scalped body of a trooper was found the Indian scouts knew immediately which tribe was responsible
"You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
Just as each latitudional tribe marked its arrows in a distinctive way, so each had a particular style of scalping: diamond-shaped, triangular, square, oval. Former staffer observed in his secret memoirs that when the scalped body of a trooper was found the Indian scouts knew immediately which tribe was responsible
Matthew 7:5 - Wikipedia
Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.
All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.
Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.?
— George Berkeley, who died in 1753 who was an IRISH IMRISH philosopher in love with the sound of his own voice
The chill nervousness
of the scrutinized,
the sick tightness in the knotted gut
when the manager says,
step into my office.
from P.I.S.S.
Pellagreen
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
This should be the golden age of free speech. And it is, if you can believe your lying eyes It’s the [Democracy-Poisoning] Golden Age of Free Speech
Howto understand and harness your workplace rage.
As you’re sitting there, about to throw an office chair, your temperature and heart rate rising, know that it isn’t all in vain. Getting angry in your office does actually have a positive side.
As you’re sitting there, about to throw an office chair, your temperature and heart rate rising, know that it isn’t all in vain. Getting angry in your office does actually have a positive side.
Reading the Awl and knowing that it’s gone now basically makes you hate every other magazine and website in existence, particularly the kinds that always hop right on top of the latest “issues” or consider themselves “part of the conversation.” Ugh. It makes you hate Twitter and the whole goddamned internet and all human beings everywhere. Reading the Awl made you feel like the whole world was filled with exciting things and smart people, and now that the Awl is gone, it feels like all we have left are boring things and dumb people. The Silent Treatment as The Awl and the Hairpin’s Best Stories, Remembered by Their Writers
The late author Norman Levine was relatively unknown in his home nation. But as The Walrus has described, perhaps with the posthumously I Don't Want To Know Anyone Too Well, that is poised to change. The first-ever full collection of these long out-of-print stories from Levine is a can't miss for lovers of Canadian authors.
