Sunday, May 20, 2007
/ 3:16 PM
Hi! It's been a while since I last blogged proper.. Changing the songs streamed on my blog is not considered blogging proper..^^ Now I wanna share some extracts from a non-fiction book entitled "A Man Without A Country", and it's written by Kurt Vonnegut.. This book got me interested enough to finish it almost in one go.. What's even better is that the words are of a bigger font, and have wide spaces between them! Hahaha.. Good for someone like me who's just beginning to increase my reading of non-fiction books.. This book doesn't try to get too deep so someone like me can understand, and is written in an interesting tone too..
Here's part of the sypnosis, so you can decide if you'll be interested to check out this book too =)
"A Man Without A Country is Kurt's Vonnegut's hilariously funny and razor-sharp look at life, art, politics, himself, and the condition of the soul of America today. ... an intimate and tender communication from one individual to his fellow Americans, sometimes joking, at other times despairing, always searching."
Good that it has views on America too.. I have been wanting to know more about what goes on in other countries.. Not that I read the main section of Straits Times though.. Hehe.. No interest to make me feel inclined to flip through leh..
And now, here are a number of interesting bits from this book!
-----
I wanted all
things to seem to
make some sense
so we could all be
happy, yes, instead
of tense. And I
made up lies, so
they all fit nice,
and I made this
sad world a
paradise.
-----
Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying guessers.
May I name two of them?
Aristotle and Hitler.
One good guesser and one bad one.
And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.
... Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead - the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.
But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.
... Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.
That's correct.
Millions spent on public health are inflationary.
That's correct.
Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.
That's correct.
Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.
That's correct.
The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.
That's correct.
Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.
That's correct.
Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.
That's correct.
That's free enterprise.
And that's correct.
The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.
That's correct.
The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.
That's correct.
The free market will do that.
That's correct.
The free market is an automatic system of justice.
That's correct.
I'm kidding.
... What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge - the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.
If they didn't do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don't you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you're going to be as lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you - and now I have to guess - about ten to one.
-----
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shameless rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once were.
And with good reason.
... In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
-----
... Ignaz Semmelweiz also believed that germs could cause diseases. ...He observed hospital routines, and began to suspect that doctors were bringing infection to the patients. He noticed that doctors often went directly from dissecting corpses in the morgue to examining mothers in the maternity ward. He suggested as an experiment that the doctors wash their hands before touching the mothers.
What could be more insulting? How dare he make such a suggestion to his social superiors? He was a nobody, he realized. But all that dying went on and on, and Semmelweis, having far less sense about how to get along with others in this world than you and I would have, kept on asking his colleagues to wash their hands.
They at last agreed to do this in a spirit of lampoonery, of satire, or scorn. How they must have lathered and lathered and scrubbed and scrubbed and cleaned under their fingernails.
The dying stopped - imagine that! The dying stopped. He saved all those lives.
... What thanks did Semmelweis get from the leaders of his profession in Viennese society, guessers all? He was forced out of the hospital and out of Austria itself, whose people he had served so well. He finished his career in a provincial hospital in Hungary. There he gave up on humanity - which is us, and our information-age knowledge, - and on himself.
One day, in the dissecting room, he took the blade of a scalpel with which he had been cutting up a corpse, and he struck it on purpose into the palm of his hand. He died, as he knew he would, of blood poisoning soon afterward.
The guessers had had all the power. They had won again. Germs indeed. The guessers revealed something else about themselves, too, which we should duly note today. They aren't really interested in saving lives. What matters to them is being listened to - as, however ignorantly, their guessing goes on and on and on. If there's anything they hate, it's a wise human.
So be one anyway. Save our lives and your lives, too. Be honourable.
-----
...Psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medial text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clincal professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, and published in 1941. Read it!
...PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
...So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. ...
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! ...
-----
The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have stauchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only is books do we learn what's really going on.
I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Sand by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.
-----
But... what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.
-----
A man from Sans Francisco put it in a letter to me:
"How can the American public be so stupid? People still believe that Bush was elected, that he cares about us and has some idea of what he is doing. How can we 'save' people by killing them and destroying their country? How can we strike first on the belief that we will soon be attacked? No sense, no reason, no moral grounds have gotten through to him. He is nothing but a moron puppet leading us all over the precipice. Why can't people see that the military dictator in the White House has no clothes?"
I told him that if he doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in 1898, long before the First World War. In the title story, he proves to his own grim satisfaction, and to mine as well, that Satan and not God created the planet earth and 'the damned human race'. If you doubt that, read your morning paper. Never mind what paper. Never mind what date.
-----
(The writer, Kurt Vonnegut, is talking to his friend on the phone)
(Kurt says) "It certainly helped to remember what the great British socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw said about this planet."
"Which was?"
"He said, 'I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.'"
"Okay."
"You don't think this is the Lunatic Asylum of the Universe?"
"Kurt, I don't think I expressed an opinion one way or the other."
"We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we are making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how crazy we are. I think the planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us with AIDS and new strains of flu and tuberclosis, and so on. I think the planet should get rid of us. We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbara Streisand song, 'People who need peoople are the luckiest people in the world' - she's talking about cannibals. Lots to eat. Yes, the planet is trying to get rid of us, but I think it's too late."
And I said good-bye to my friend, hung up the phone, sat down and wrote this epitaph: "The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."
-----
Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
-----
Humour is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself. Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too awful, and humour doesn't work anymore. Somebody like Mark Twain thought life was quite awful but held the awfulness at bay with jokes and so forth, but finally he couldn't do it anymore. His wife, his best friend, and two of his daughters had died.
It may be that I am no longer able to joke -- that it is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny, and some are not. I used to be funny, perhaps I am not anymore. There may have been so many shocks and disappointment that the defense of humour no longer works. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I've seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with it in terms of laughter.
This may have happened already. I really don't know what I'm going to become from now on. I'm simply along for the ride to see what happens to this body and this brain of mine. I'm startled that I became a writer. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming.
All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humour can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. If a hundred years from now people are still laughing. I'd certainly be pleased.
-----
I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any "Good Old Days", there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, "Don't look at me. I just got here."
There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity - the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, "Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end."
When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped my on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.
Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can't be a man unless he'd gone to war.
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
-----
Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
-----
Who was the wisest person I ever met in my life? It was a man, but of course it needn't have been. It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl.
...I said, "Saul, I'm a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?"
Six seconds passed, and then he said, "It's very simple. There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself."
I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"
Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."
-----
(The book ends off with a poem! ^-^)
REQUIEM
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."
The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the flooe
of the Grand Canyon.
"It is done."
People did not like it here.
-----
That's all from this book! I provided so many extracts right.. Wah I use quite a bit of time one leh.. But I absorb it again when I type it out.. Wonder if I should do this less, or not? Anyway, this book was a good read! Good viewpoints.. I like to have viewpoints introduced to me like that! Either to put some of the more hazy thoughts I have had into words, or to intro viewpoints to me to excite my brain..=P
See ya!
Here's part of the sypnosis, so you can decide if you'll be interested to check out this book too =)
"A Man Without A Country is Kurt's Vonnegut's hilariously funny and razor-sharp look at life, art, politics, himself, and the condition of the soul of America today. ... an intimate and tender communication from one individual to his fellow Americans, sometimes joking, at other times despairing, always searching."
Good that it has views on America too.. I have been wanting to know more about what goes on in other countries.. Not that I read the main section of Straits Times though.. Hehe.. No interest to make me feel inclined to flip through leh..
And now, here are a number of interesting bits from this book!
-----
I wanted all
things to seem to
make some sense
so we could all be
happy, yes, instead
of tense. And I
made up lies, so
they all fit nice,
and I made this
sad world a
paradise.
-----
Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying guessers.
May I name two of them?
Aristotle and Hitler.
One good guesser and one bad one.
And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.
... Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead - the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.
But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.
... Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.
That's correct.
Millions spent on public health are inflationary.
That's correct.
Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.
That's correct.
Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.
That's correct.
The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.
That's correct.
Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.
That's correct.
Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.
That's correct.
That's free enterprise.
And that's correct.
The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.
That's correct.
The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.
That's correct.
The free market will do that.
That's correct.
The free market is an automatic system of justice.
That's correct.
I'm kidding.
... What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge - the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.
If they didn't do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don't you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you're going to be as lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you - and now I have to guess - about ten to one.
-----
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shameless rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once were.
And with good reason.
... In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
-----
... Ignaz Semmelweiz also believed that germs could cause diseases. ...He observed hospital routines, and began to suspect that doctors were bringing infection to the patients. He noticed that doctors often went directly from dissecting corpses in the morgue to examining mothers in the maternity ward. He suggested as an experiment that the doctors wash their hands before touching the mothers.
What could be more insulting? How dare he make such a suggestion to his social superiors? He was a nobody, he realized. But all that dying went on and on, and Semmelweis, having far less sense about how to get along with others in this world than you and I would have, kept on asking his colleagues to wash their hands.
They at last agreed to do this in a spirit of lampoonery, of satire, or scorn. How they must have lathered and lathered and scrubbed and scrubbed and cleaned under their fingernails.
The dying stopped - imagine that! The dying stopped. He saved all those lives.
... What thanks did Semmelweis get from the leaders of his profession in Viennese society, guessers all? He was forced out of the hospital and out of Austria itself, whose people he had served so well. He finished his career in a provincial hospital in Hungary. There he gave up on humanity - which is us, and our information-age knowledge, - and on himself.
One day, in the dissecting room, he took the blade of a scalpel with which he had been cutting up a corpse, and he struck it on purpose into the palm of his hand. He died, as he knew he would, of blood poisoning soon afterward.
The guessers had had all the power. They had won again. Germs indeed. The guessers revealed something else about themselves, too, which we should duly note today. They aren't really interested in saving lives. What matters to them is being listened to - as, however ignorantly, their guessing goes on and on and on. If there's anything they hate, it's a wise human.
So be one anyway. Save our lives and your lives, too. Be honourable.
-----
...Psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medial text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clincal professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, and published in 1941. Read it!
...PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
...So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. ...
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! ...
-----
The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have stauchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only is books do we learn what's really going on.
I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Sand by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.
-----
But... what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.
-----
A man from Sans Francisco put it in a letter to me:
"How can the American public be so stupid? People still believe that Bush was elected, that he cares about us and has some idea of what he is doing. How can we 'save' people by killing them and destroying their country? How can we strike first on the belief that we will soon be attacked? No sense, no reason, no moral grounds have gotten through to him. He is nothing but a moron puppet leading us all over the precipice. Why can't people see that the military dictator in the White House has no clothes?"
I told him that if he doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in 1898, long before the First World War. In the title story, he proves to his own grim satisfaction, and to mine as well, that Satan and not God created the planet earth and 'the damned human race'. If you doubt that, read your morning paper. Never mind what paper. Never mind what date.
-----
(The writer, Kurt Vonnegut, is talking to his friend on the phone)
(Kurt says) "It certainly helped to remember what the great British socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw said about this planet."
"Which was?"
"He said, 'I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.'"
"Okay."
"You don't think this is the Lunatic Asylum of the Universe?"
"Kurt, I don't think I expressed an opinion one way or the other."
"We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we are making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares. This is how crazy we are. I think the planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us with AIDS and new strains of flu and tuberclosis, and so on. I think the planet should get rid of us. We're really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbara Streisand song, 'People who need peoople are the luckiest people in the world' - she's talking about cannibals. Lots to eat. Yes, the planet is trying to get rid of us, but I think it's too late."
And I said good-bye to my friend, hung up the phone, sat down and wrote this epitaph: "The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."
-----
Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
-----
Humour is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself. Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too awful, and humour doesn't work anymore. Somebody like Mark Twain thought life was quite awful but held the awfulness at bay with jokes and so forth, but finally he couldn't do it anymore. His wife, his best friend, and two of his daughters had died.
It may be that I am no longer able to joke -- that it is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny, and some are not. I used to be funny, perhaps I am not anymore. There may have been so many shocks and disappointment that the defense of humour no longer works. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I've seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with it in terms of laughter.
This may have happened already. I really don't know what I'm going to become from now on. I'm simply along for the ride to see what happens to this body and this brain of mine. I'm startled that I became a writer. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming.
All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humour can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. If a hundred years from now people are still laughing. I'd certainly be pleased.
-----
I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any "Good Old Days", there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, "Don't look at me. I just got here."
There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity - the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, "Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end."
When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped my on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.
Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can't be a man unless he'd gone to war.
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
-----
Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
-----
Who was the wisest person I ever met in my life? It was a man, but of course it needn't have been. It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl.
...I said, "Saul, I'm a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?"
Six seconds passed, and then he said, "It's very simple. There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself."
I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"
Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."
-----
(The book ends off with a poem! ^-^)
REQUIEM
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."
The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the flooe
of the Grand Canyon.
"It is done."
People did not like it here.
-----
That's all from this book! I provided so many extracts right.. Wah I use quite a bit of time one leh.. But I absorb it again when I type it out.. Wonder if I should do this less, or not? Anyway, this book was a good read! Good viewpoints.. I like to have viewpoints introduced to me like that! Either to put some of the more hazy thoughts I have had into words, or to intro viewpoints to me to excite my brain..=P
See ya!
We know life's hard, truth is hard, lies are hard, they are all hard to accept when they have been
found out, and i'm rushing history homework on the Abyissian Crisis about Italy and Abyssia going into war and that the League Of Nations cannot stop this from happening, and beacuse they are formed by means to stop war and
peace-keep the countries together, they have thus failed to achieve that. I think i tend to hold a class for history instead of telling you about me, i'm basically a what subject-realted lover (humanities) and thus
I am more analytical and critical about things, and likes to study about dead people, haha. lol. it's history what can you expect and also geography, it amazes me. I really like it alot, so what have you? Again to find this answer
you need to enter into your own reality and reflect
it's amazing. amzing how people change the way of things, like how I used to hate outdoors in Band
felt it was a complete waste of time, i've acquired to like it more, i guess people change, their thereotical means and applications in life just goes on into a new direction, and see things in another perspective, i guess- it's
all in the mind. It really amazes me how these comes into action, from someone so pessimistic has changed his own view of things, and thus my friend is scoring much better, being more optimisitc and not think of his old way of suicidal
thoughts, which are pretty daunting. and thus we need to see things, in another light, another perspective and another new way, to enable us to open up our minds, and make more new things, the new way it is. 