aneverendinghorrorshow

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

The commandment 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' is the strongest defence against human aggression and an excellent example of the unpsychological manner in which the cultural super-ego proceeds. It is impossible to keep this commandment; such a huge inflation of love can only lower its value, not remove the problem. Civilization neglects all this; it reminds us only that the harder it is to comply with a precept, the more merit there is in compliance. Yet in today's civilization, whoever adheres to such a precept puts himself at a disadvantage in relation to all who flout it. How potent an obstacle to civilization aggression must be if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggression itself! In this situation, what we call natural ethics has nothing to offer but the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think one is better than others. This is where ethics based on religion enters the scene with its promises of a better life thereafter. I am inclined to think that, for as long as virtue goes unrewarded here below, ethics will preach in vain. I have no doubt, too, that a real change in people's relations to property will be of more help here than any ethical commandment; yet the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made impracticable by a new idealistic misreading of human nature.

-- Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

All through history, man has been both instructed and frightened by his dreams. And he has good reason for both reactions: his inner world must often have been far more threatening and far less comprehensible than his outer world, as indeed it still is; and his first task was not to shape tools for controlling the environment, but to shape instruments even more powerful and compelling in order to control himself, above all, his unconscious. The invention and perfection of these instruments -- rituals, symbols, words, images, standard modes of behavior -- was, I hope to establish, the principal occupation of early man, more necessary to survival than tool-making, and far more essential to his later development.

--Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature […]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

--Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

If survival were all that mattered to primitive man, he could have survived with no better equipment than his immediate hominid ancestors had possessed. Some further unfocussed need, some inner striving, impossible to explain by the outer pressures of the environment, must have propelled man on his career; and something else besides scrabbling for food occupied his days. The favoring condition for this development was man's rich neural equipment; but by that very fact he was too open to subjective promptings to harden submissively in the mod of his species, sinking back into the repetitious animal round, and cooperating in the flowing process of organic change.

--Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

Man's chief difference from the brutes, lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities -- his pre-eminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary. And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his wants are to be trusted; that even when their gratification seems furthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present power of reckoning. Prune down his extravagance, sober him and you undo him.

William James, The Will to Believe

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

The light of human consciousness is, so far, the ultimate wonder of life, and the main justification for all the suffering and misery that have accompanied human development. In the tending of that fire, in the building of that world, in the intensification of that light, in the widening of man's open-eyed and sympathetic fellowship with all created being, lies the meaning of human history.

--Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

Take the mysterious imprints of human hands made upon the walls of caves as far apart as Africa and Australia. These imprints are all the more puzzling because so many of these hands show one or more finger joints missing. One would have no clue to this symbol were it not for the fact that there are still tribes equally widely separated where the sacrifice of a finger joint is a rite of mourning: a personal loss to emphasize a greater loss. ... Although in many other species the parent will on occasion sacrifice its life to protect its mate or its young, this voluntary symbolic sacrifice of a finger joint is a distinctly human trait. Where such feeling is lacking, as so often in the whole routine of our mechanized, impersonal megalopolitan culture, the human ties become so weak that only stringent external regimentation will hold the group together.

--Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

...it reached the point with me where I would feel some secret, abnormal, mean little pleasure in returning to my corner on some most nasty Petersburg night and being highly conscious of having once again done a nasty thing that day, and again that what had been done could not be undone, and I would gnaw, gnaw at myself with my teeth, inwardly, secretly, tear and suck at myself until the bitterness finally turned into some shameful, accursed sweetness, and finally -- into a decided serious pleasure!

--Dostoevysky, Notes from Underground

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think of what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

I noticed his hands. Scarred, busted, notched, permanently seamed with grease and mud. He glanced around the room, trying to spot something that needed replacing or repair. Such flaws were mainly an occasion for discourse. It put Vernon at an advantage to talk about gaskets and washers, about grouting, caulking, spackling. There were times when he seemed to attack me with terms like ratchet drill and whipsaw. He saw my shakiness in such matters as a sign of some deeper incompetence or stupidity. These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet -- fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

We all got in the car and went out to the commercial strip in the no man's land beyond the town boundary. The never-ending neon. I pulled in at a place that specialized in chicken parts and brownies. We decided to eat in the car. The car was sufficient for our needs. We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn't need light and space. We certainly didn't need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands...We ate fully dressed, in hats and heavy coats, without speaking, ripping into chicken parts with our hands and teeth. There was a mood of intense concentration, minds converging on a single compelling idea. I was surprised to find I was enormously hungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

"I have a spacey theory about human fear, sure enough. Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self -- the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give to this complicated process is fear."

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

Winnie was barely into her thirties but she had a sane and practiced eye for the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

"These are mainly B-movies, rural drive-in movies. I tell my students not to look for apocalypses in such places. I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. they are positive events, full of the old 'can-do' spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges...I tell my students if they want to bring technology into it, they have to take this into account, the tendency toward grandiose deeds, toward pursuing a dream." "A dream? How do your students reply? "Just the way you did. 'A dream?' All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?" "What about it?" I said. "I tell them it's not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from the complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It's a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities...

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain." "Heinrich's brain theories. They're all true. We're the sum of our chemical impulses. Don't tell me this. It's unbearable to think about...What happens to good and evil in this system? Passion, envy and hate? Do they become a tangle of neurons? Are you telling me that a whole tradition of human failings is now at an end, that cowardice, sadism, molestation are meaningless terms? Are we being asked to regard these things nostalgically? What about murderous rage? A murderer used to have a certain fearsome size to him. His crime was large. What happens when we reduce it to cells and molecules?"

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

"I thought about my mother dying. Then she died...I felt so guilty. I thought her death was connected to my thinking about it. I feel the same way about my own death. The more I think about it, the sooner it will happen." "How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing? Wear the same disguise."

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[aneverendinghorrorshow]

"This is the nature of modern death," Murray said. "It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension. It has a sweep it never had before. We study it objectively. We can predict its appearance, trace its path in the body. We can take cross-section pictures of it, tape its tremors and waves. We've never been so close to it, so familiar with its habits and attitudes. We know it intimately. But it continues to grow, to acquire breadth and scope, new outlets, new passages and means. The more we learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature? Or some private superstition of mine? I sense that the dead are closer to us than ever. I sense that we inhabit the same air as the dead..."

Don DeLillo, White Noise