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On freedom

What about freedom
implies a right to be wrong?

On subjectivity

Just as there is no pure objectivity, neither is there any completely subjective position, nor can there be so long as the self remains further divisible.

Half the harm (Eliot)

Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t want to do harm—but the harm does not interest them...or they do not see it...because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

T. S. Eliot

Our souls

If our souls are reflected in our technology,
then our souls are mostly crass and utilitarian.

Preference

I'd rather be superfluous than redundant.

Our mistakes

Our mistakes stack higher and heavier until nothing we can do, nothing we have done, can justify them.

New poems

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No one is exempt (Gitlin)

However bleak the outlook, we are responsible for our actions, and no one is exempt. We may choose servility, we may choose resistance, and we must do so in darkness, without guarantees. When we find our fellow spirits, we need to disabuse ourselves of illusions that there is any shortcut out of the swamp. The swamp was a long time in the making and it will be a long time finding our way out. What matters is that we always, every day, ask ourselves what we may do today that we will be proud of tomorrow.

Todd Gitlin

On free will

Free will doesn't apply at birth or death—the suicide aside—should we be so surprised, then, if we can't find clear signs of it over the course of our lives?

As though nothing (Shepard)

It seemed to him all they had undergone and felt and done would one day be diminished and relegated to mere narrative, its heroes oversimplified or their heroic natures overborne by the mundanity of detail, a story so degraded, so shorn of wonderment by telling and re-telling that—despite love and redemption, suffering and loss, mystery and death—it would be in the end as though nothing had happened.

Lucius Shepard, from "The Skull"

On knowledge

Knowledge is so much more than power.

Deeper

Nothing sounds deeper than the unfamiliar echo of those with capacities we lack.

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The news (Zurita)

I doubt if a true artist can remain the same after watching the news on television.

Raúl Zurita

On harmony

Harmony is always an illusion, an apparent congruence that exists only from a privileged perspective. Move, and it disappears.

For being

Never apologize for being.
Or expect others to.

True love (Porter)

"You remind me of everything I have ever been interested in," she said.

Max Porter, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

Effect

Some dream of cause,
but all live with effect.

Telling the truth (Orwell)

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

Oxymoron

"Permanent haven" is an oxymoron.

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Obscure (Devereux)

Happy were he could he finish forth his fate
In some unhaunted desert, where, obscure
From all society, from love and hate
Of worldly folk, there should he sleep secure.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex

Rogue whatever

I have vowed never to go see another Star Wars movie with a Death Star in it.

Assuring the triumph (Camus)

The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice.

Albert Camus

Ownership

When we say "I own,"
what we mean is "I am entitled to destroy."

Kakistocracy

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?

James Russell Lowell

Thought

The last thought of sleep
is the first dream of morning.

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Trees (Wagner)

When I loved you and you loved me,
You were the sky, the sea, the tree;
Now the skies are skies, and seas are seas,
And trees are brown and they are trees.

Charles A. Wagner

On marriage

How could I believe in marriage when I've never seen any evidence of a basic human compatibility?

Something fails (Theroux)

Nature is at constant war—something fails as something prevails. And then half of the species that have survived the long ceaseless stupid struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers molded for torment, claws and cusps sculptured all for death—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, and sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in agonies of brutal torture.

Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

Surprise

Running up on a friend's limitations is always the most surprising and frustrating thing.

U.S. politics

Conservatism in the United States is broken, madly shattered into dangerous shards. Liberalism may be even more broken in its almost total failure to acknowledge, address, or even adapt to the right-wing descent into a strange chaos part anarchy and part authoritarianism.

Hypothesis

That we feel we can see how X has led to Y does not mean that X has led to Y or, if it has, that X had to lead to Y. An hypothesis documented remains unproven.

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On politicians (Carlin)

Everybody complains about politicians. Well, where do people think these politicians come from?...They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens.... It’s what our system produces:  Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.

George Carlin

Responsibility

The fact that everything is inaccurate and everything is unjust does not give us license to dismiss accuracy and justice. Some things remain more accurate and more just than others, and there remains a responsibility to and an advantage in actively weighing one against the other before making our choices, before offering our support.

Slow cooker Korean beef

From this recipe.

The dark

We would rather see in the dark
than see the dark.

Dreaming

We are the universe's sensory organs, dreaming of autonomy.

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Not always

Image is not always illusion.

Our obligations

We cannot wait to move one another to the safety of memory and, having done so, for the world to remove us from our obligations to one another.

Multi-layer dip

So much

Heritage is so much smaller than culture.

Damage

Because the world can absorb so much damage, we believe its capacity to do so infinite.  It isn't.

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Those

Those who love God are those who have found the world unlovable.

On participation

Presence can be commanded, but participation is always a choice.

Stuffed mushrooms

So good!  Adapted from this recipe.

Everything & nothing

Everything matters;
nothing is meaningful.

New poems

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What time does (Rahman)

That is what time does to us all.  It kills all the lives we might have had, destroys all the worlds we might have known.

Zia Haider Rahman, In The Light Of What We Know

On values

Values are an artifice
intuited from chaos.

The only answers (Rahman)

The only answers each of us hears are to the questions we are capable of asking.

Zia Haider Rahman, In The Light Of What We Know

The world's promise

The world always keeps its promise
because the world never promised anything.