Insomnia

Between two and three o’clock in the morning was also the time when dreams refused to be drowned, but when the heart slowed in its beating, packed in sand, heavy, like a sack of pipis brought in with the tide and stranded when the tide went out, as tides do, hanging placards on the shore for the comfort of those who haunt beaches who keep returning again and again to make sure what the tide is up to, what gifts it has strewn on the sand, whether it is at home, in bed, asleep, complaining, raging, raking up the past or the dead, letting the matter rest, avoiding the issue, or whether it had got tired of sitting brooding on the cheerless hearth and has put on its green cloak and gone out to do destruction—murder or love…

Quotation: Scented Gardens for the Blind. Janet Frame, 1963

Philosophers Hate Life

‘You are not sufficiently democratic,’ answered the policeman, but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor animal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate.  

We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals.  We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. 

Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. 

Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.  Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seem to them to be lesser lives.  But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other peoples.

Quotation from The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, 1908

Like Everyone Else

“Think of them all,” said Truman. “Cities, manganese mines, governments, clubs. India, China, Russia — make you wonder what it all means. Cotton, iron, steel … where does it all lead?”

“All parts of an unco-ordinated pattern. Man as a person looking for what I think I’ve found. The search throws up bright bits of gold and information which catch his attention and prevent him from looking deeper into himself. Yes, a staggering spectacle of a genius engaged in a wasteful way of living. And yet every activity leading back like an arrow on the map to central metaphysical problems of the self. The wars of factories, of diplomats, of concepts—all hopelessly entangled in the opposites that created them.”

‘Could you teach them any different?” Truman spoke piously, enviously, as if there were nothing he himself might wish to do more than to alter humanity. “I would not try: any more than I try to alter you.”

“What would you do then?”

“Nothing. Pay my rent like everyone else.”

Quotation from:  The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell

Sneaking a Look

You are in your 60s, even 50s, and you are walking by a shop window, or in some area in which a security monitor shows a scan of the line you are in. You sneak a look. You see someone in the space where you should be but you do not recognize the interloper. Then, after an unseemly lag of a second or two you are forced to remake you own acquaintance; it seems you no longer know yourself at first sight. The you behind your eyes believes you look like you did twenty years ago, and it assumes that dated image is the real you, even if recent photos tell a horror story. But photos seldom confirmed your self-image, even when you were young, so you can dismiss the latest batch. In high school you accepted only one or two out of the fifty on the contact sheet as satisfactory, though none of your friends or family, when asked, could distinguish the person in the photos you thought reasonably flattering from the many in which you looked like a total doofus. To them they were all indistinguishably you they were not even putting you on, as you vainly believed, when they thought the best picture was one you felt the most loathsome. 

Quotation from: Losing It: in which an aging professor laments his shrinking brain, which he flatters himself formerly did him Noble Service.  By William Ian Miller. Yale University Press. 2011