situationdefusingpopcorn-blog

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At the close he dropped his voice two tones, almost to speaking level, and softly added: 'And [God] is very good to us this day, O people of Damascus.' The clamour hushed, as everyone seemed to obey the call to prayer on this their first night of perfect freedom. While my fancy, in the overwhelming pause, showed me my loneliness and lack of reason in their movement: since only for me, of all of the hearers, was the event sorrowful and the phrase meaningless.

T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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To endure by order, or because it was a duty - that was easy. The soldier suffered only involuntary knocks; whereas our will had to play the ganger till the workmen fainted, to keep in a safe place and thrust others into danger. It might have been heroic to have offered up my own life for a cause in which I could not believe: but it was a theft of souls to make others die in sincerity for my graven image.

T. E. Lawrence, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

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The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

Peter Wessel Zapffe, in “The Last Messiah”

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The wind that rustles these trees rustles me too

“The Hermit" & “The Devil” two small 8” x 10” limited edition giclee prints of the Prisma Visions Collection, a suite of 23 prints. Each print is available individually for $20 for a limited time at www.jamesreadsmerch.com

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The evil that men do lives on, the good is oft interred with their bones.

Marcus Antonius in Julius Caesar by Shakespeare. Later quoted sometime in an Iron Maiden song.

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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Zdzisław Beksiński (Polish, 1929-2005, b. Sanok, Poland) - Untitled, 1971  Paintings: Oil on Fibreboard

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Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principle appetites of the soul.

The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley

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We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

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"A province would be won when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom. The presence of the enemy was secondary."

T. E. Lawrence, in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."

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But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

Peter Wessel Zapffe, in “The Last Messiah”

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Kusanagi: Well, I guess cyborgs like myself have a tendency to be paranoid about our origins. Sometimes I suspect I'm not who I think I am. Like maybe I died a long time ago, and somebody took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there never was a real me in the first place, and I'm completely synthetic like that thing. Batou: You've got human brain cells in that titanium shell of yours. You're treated like other humans, so stop with the angst. Kusanagi: But that's just it. That's the only thing that makes me feel human: The way I'm treated. I mean, who knows what's inside our heads. Have you ever seen your own brain? Batou: It sounds to me like you're doubting your own ghost. Kusanagi: What if a cyber-brain could possibly generate its own ghost, create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then? Batou: Hmph. That's bullshit. You know you're dying to see what's inside of that thing, aren't you? And I can't stop you. Neither of us has any idea what's inside there. Just be careful, okay?

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

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"...If my dream was true, then everything we know, everything we think we know, is a lie. It means the world's about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don't even want to think about. It means that we're just dolls. We don't have a clue what's really going down, we just kid ourselves that we're in control of our lives while a paper's thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they're tired, or bored."

Rose Walker in Sandman: Vol. 2, "The Doll's House", part seven, by Neil Gaiman.

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"The world is changing, music's changing, guys and gals are changing. A thousand years from now, there'll be no men and no women - just wankers."

Trainspotting

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Buddhist terms are not extremely hard to understand. To pronounce, however, requires a sagelike patience few can achieve. From "Heart-Wood from the Bo Tree" by Buddhadasa Bhikku, an excellent primer on topics central to Buddhism.

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"...A wild animal that feels it no longer has any reason to live reaches in the end a point when its remaining energies may actually be directed toward dying..."

Watership Down, by Richard Adams