Category: Quotable

In spring

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), ch. III, p. 62

Annotation

Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved. The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of conclusion. Mystery finally claims us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe.

—Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods, p. 304, n. 136

Henhouse asylum

There was a certain coherency in [John Maynard] Keynes’s (the intellectual godfather of the IMF) conception of the [International Monetary] Fund and its role. Keynes identified a market failure—a reason why markets could not be left to themselves—that might benefit from collective action. He was concerned that markets might generate persistent unemployment. He went further. He showed why there was a need for global collective action, because the actions of one country spilled over to others. One country’s imports are another country’s exports. Cutbacks in imports by one country, for whatever reason, hurt other countries’ economies.

* * *

Today, however, market fundamentalists dominate the IMF; they believe that markets by and large work well and that governments by and large work badly. We have an obvious problem: a public institution created to address certain failures in the market but currently run by economists who have both a high level of confidence in markets and little confidence in public institutions. The inconsistencies at the IMF appear particularly troubling when viewed from the perspective of the advances in economic theory in the last three decades.

—Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), ch. 8, p. 196

Stung

Via Utne Reader, Katy Butler interviews Jeff Bridges for the fall 2010 issue of Tricycle:

Movies are a wonderful spiritual playground. The film you actually make is like a beautiful snakeskin that you find on the ground and make a hatband out of. But the making of the movie is the snake itself. That is what I take with me. That includes hanging out with the other actors in the trailer after work, and getting into this position where you’ve empowered another actor to have a power over you, to affect you. That’s a spiritual place to be.

Working on it

CALLIE. I can’t connect with mountains, trees, the little animals—they snub me. You know how you can be with two other people and you’re all having a great time. Then the person sitting next to you says something in French and the two of them burst into laughter, best laugh anyone’s had all night. And you’re left out because you took Spanish in the seventh grade, not French. That’s what nature does to me. Speaks French to the other people at the table.

—Diana Son, Stop Kiss, sc. 1

Grand Central

A leader from the 18 November 2010 number of The Economist:

Public behaviour still treats the internet like a village, in which new faces are welcome and anti-social behaviour a rarity. A better analogy would be a railway station in a big city, where hustlers gather to prey on the credulity of new arrivals. Wise behaviour in such places is to walk fast, avoid eye contact and be brusque with strangers. Try that online.

I order just coffee

MAX TARASOV. Arthur, no one come! You sell donut and no one wants donut anymore! People now, they eat yogurt and banana, not donut. And people who want donut can go to Duckin’ Donut and eat the shit cake! If they want coffee, they go to Starbuck and pay four dollars for caramel fuck-a-cheeto. You are only donut shop on North Side, you have said this. All the others close. Why? Because they are selling product no one want! Donut is like videotape, it is over! Time change everything, and donut has been left behind.

— Tracy Letts, Superior Donuts, act 1

Flying

The Old River Control Auxiliary Structure is a rank of seven towers, each buff with a white crown. They are vertical on the upstream side, and they slope toward the Atchafalaya. Therefore, they resemble flying buttresses facing the Mississippi. The towers are separated by six arciform gates, convex to the Mississippi, and hinged in trunnion blocks secured with steel to carom the force of the river into the core of the structure. Lifted by cables, these tainter gates, as they are called, are about as light and graceful as anything could be that has a composite weight of twenty-six hundred tons. Each of them is sixty-two feet wide. They are the strongest the Corps has ever designed and built. A work of engineering such as a Maillart bridge or a bridge by Christian Menn can outdo some other works of art, because it is not only a gift to the imagination but also structural in the matrix of the world. The auxiliary structure at Old River contains too many working components to be classed with such a bridge, but in grandeur and in profile it would not shame a pharaoh.

—John McPhee, “Atchafalaya” (1989)

The fierce urgency of now

Martin Luther King. Jr., addresses the crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 28 August 1963:

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Flaubertian

The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

—James Wood, How Fiction Works, §39

Getting off the carousel

For most men and women these thirty years [between thirty-five and sixty-five] are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom were are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘”O Russet Witch!”‘, iv

Makes a good story, at least

(Since I was a teenager, I’ve been going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which mixes Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays. I recently saw the understudy—with twenty-four hours’ notice—play the lead in Cyrano de Bergerac. Every fifteen minutes or so, he’d call out to the assistant director, sitting in the front row, to provide the line for him. This Cyrano’s crippled eloquence, the actor’s grace, his refusal to wilt, was much more moving to me than anything in the play or any other play.)

—David Shields, Reality Hunger, §508

No thumbs up

ROTHKO: Of course you like it—how can you not like it?! Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it’s all nice and pretty and likable. Everything is fun in the sun! Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has… listen to me now… significance.

—John Logan, Red, sc. 1