There Are Three Opponents In Wrestling — The Self, The Other Wrestler, And Time. In Wrestling, You
There are three opponents in wrestling — the self, the other wrestler, and time. In wrestling, you are judged for your activity. How aggressively are you seeking out your opponent? How much time are you spending in a submissive position? Are you trying to get out of that position? In poetry, simply scribbling does not move the score. Eyeing the subject, circling about it, and getting ready to surge forward will not put the poem in your grasp. Busyness doesn't move the judge. Simply scribbling, biding your time, reading, is seen as idleness to the non-writer. To the writer, it is a flurry of activity. The trouble, then, is that writing a long poem suffuses idleness and activity over a sustained period. Nothing happens. Everything happens
Oliver de la Paz Six Minutes and Onward: Wrestling, Long Poems, and Time
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…unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.
Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (via naranzarian)
Let me introduce a pair of rather less admirable siblings in the relativist family. The first of these is the familiar "freshman relativist," who urges that all opinions and actions are equally good and should be equally tolerated. He has two mantras: "Who's to say?" and "That's just your opinion." The other sibling is less amiable. Instead of a grin, he wears a sneer. He takes himself to have seen through or debunked the claims of others. So when we use words like truth, reason, objectivity, justice, fairness, or progress, we may think we are putting on robes of state, dignities that with luck we have earned and come to deserve, by doing our thinking properly. But to this sibling we are doing nothing but putting on tawdry theatrical props, disguises, and masks - and what is disguised is a Pandora's box of ugly things like persuasion, rhetoric, self-deception, and ultimately power and force. So where the previous sibling was tolerant and vacant, this sibling is destructive and bitter. Standing on the shoulders of modern thinkers, he tries to crush them under the weight of contempt. But this sibling is equally obnoxious. He is oblivious to his own intellectual limitations and laziness. He could not describe a transistor, let alone make one, but he will use computers and faxes and mobile phones full of them to spread the message that "transistor" is just a construct of Western bourgeois culture. Where the freshman relativist was promiscuously vacant, this relativist is promiscuously suspicious. - We still have to make judgments and act in the light of them. We just have to make sure that we do so as well as we can. Once we have to make up our minds about something, the issue is the issue. The other siblings duck issues, either retreating to an ironic, playful, aesthetic detachment from the business of life, or substituting allegiance to a realpolitik of naked force. ...They shy away from convictions and causes altogether. They suppose they have seen through the whole business of taking issues at face value. They say that we should not and cannot judge whether Tolstoy is a more interesting writer than Stephen King, or whether there was ever a Holocaust, or whether a religion that enjoins slaughtering the infidel is worse than one which does not. Expressions of opinion on such matters would be bad form: politically incorrect, disguises for colonialism, liberal hegemony, dominations of gender, and so on. It is this paralysis of judgment that the commentators lament. You cannot drive down the freeway with a mind vacant of opinion on where the traffic is and how fast it is going.
Simon Blackburn Relativism's Ugly Siblings
The Princess and the Trolls –The Changeling, by John Bauer, 1913.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway (via scribnerbooks)
She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undeflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice, because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning towards quick, sometimes cutting, interventions, usually enough to capture their attention; then she could go on for a while in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem. Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, “Gentlemen, let’s proceed,” and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, “Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys.” The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female. She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.
Carl Sagan, Contact (22)
“The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem.”
(via varanine)
