Subtle Prisons

"I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones." - Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

[lostsplendor]

Moon River: Manhattan from the Hudson River, 1946 (via LIFE)

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The Epitaphs of Famous Authors

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

2. John Keats: 

“Here Lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water”

3. Sylvia Plath: 

“Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.”

4. Robert Frost: 

“I had a lovers’ quarrel with the world.”

5. Dorothy Parker: 

“Excuse my dust.”

[schws-blog]

Françoise Sagan, laying in bed in her Paris apartment listening to music. Photo by Thomas D. McAvoy for Life magazine, April 1955.

[atomicyawn-blog]

But for the first time in my life I was happy with the full consciousness of being happy. It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of what concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it. And that’s how I was - except that I didn’t have the power or the courage to kill myself right then and there. It was good, too, that I didn’t do myself in because there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even, something which if anyone had tried to describe to me I would probably not have believed.

Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi 

[dinosaurgiantpenny]

[thebeatlesordie]

[subtleprisons-blog]

George Harrison and Pattie Boyd, Tahiti, 1964.

[mmattoid]

[cruello]

Mystify by MercuryyPhoto

[mind------matter]

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art - which just means art whose primary aim is to make money - is, lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is dumb, I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

David Foster Wallace 

[discoverynews]

Discovery News chats with Caltech astronomer Mike Brown about the recent discovery of a fifth moon orbiting Pluto:

“It’s a really good reminder that you don’t have to be a planet to be interesting.”

[stringsofthoughts]

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Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

Paul Bowles (via nickfuriously)

[regardintemporel]

Nicole Aline Legault

[retrogirly]

Marion Martin and Satan.

[randomjack]

[atomicyawn-blog]

It is clear that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity demand a great deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it… If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children’s ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes.

Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? | Bertrand Russell (via atomicyawn)

[softagardenblooms]

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