The Zen of Lore

That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover!

...and I understand him: this is the one deep yearning of our lives: to let everybody consider us great sinners!

We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.

That God created the world and then left it to a forsaken humanity trying to address him in an echoless void - this idea isn't new.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.

"Individualism?" what does it have to do with individualism when a camera takes your picture in a moment of agony? On the contrary, it means that an individiual no longer belongs to himself but becomes the property of others..."

"Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine the fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you."

...he would lie down in it and visualize his funeral. These were the most beautiful moments of his life, these reveries in the coffin: he dwelt on his immortality.

A man longs to be immortal, and one day the camera will show us a moth contorted into a pathetic grimace - the only thing we will remember about him, the only thing that will remain as a parabola of his entire life.

Nothing is more useful that to adopt the status of a child: a child can do whatever it likes, for it is innocent and inexperienced; it need not observe the rules of social behavior, for it has not yet entered a world ruled by form; it may show its feelings, whether they are appropriate or not.

Fatigue: a silent bridge leading from the shore of life to the shore of death.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

Agnes looked upon old men with envy: it seemed to her that they aged differently: her father's body slowly changed into its shadow, it dematerialized, it remained in a world merely as a carelessly incarnated soul. In contrast the more useless a woman's body becomes, the more it is a body, heavy and burdensome; it resembles an old factory destined for demolition, which the woman's self must watch to the very end, like a caretaker.

There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the methods of subtraction.

Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivation the self by way of the addition method are subject: they us addition in order to creat a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.

Let me put it another way: a mere (simple and innocent) love for showers can become an attribute of the self only on condition that we let the world know we are ready to fight for it.

Before the powerful politicians realized that they were fighting under unequal conditions - for she was allowed to ask questions but they were not - they were already rolling on the floor of the ring, KO'ed.

I will therefore make my statement more precise: the power of the journalist is not based on his right to ask but on his right to demand an answer.

The advertising agencies of the Communist Party (the so-called agitprop departments) have long forgotten the practical goal of their activity ( to make the communist system better liked) and have become an end in themselves: they have created their own language, their formulas, their aesthetics (the heads of these agencies once had absolute power over art in their countries), their idea of the right life-style, which they cultivated, disseminate, and force upon their unfortunate peoples.

We needn't be surprised by this self-confidence: in the last few decades, imagoglogy has gained a historic victory of ideology.

Do you realize what is the eternal precondition of tragedy? The existence of ideals that are considered more valuable that human life.

Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterize it: a longing for originality, a longing for change.

"That's unavoidable," said Paul. "When a person is declared an ass, he begins to act like an ass."

Fame means that you are known by many people whom you yourself do not know and who make a claim upon you, want to know all about you, and act as if they owned you.

The fight for is always connected with the fight against, and the the preposition "for" is always forgotten in the course of the fight in favor of the preposition "against."

Paul is the simpleton of ambiguity.

Paul tried to act like the brilliant champion of frivolity.

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who understand toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially for your in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uniterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.

Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and to enjoy it. What's more, he no longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.

Only a reason can lead to such an unreasonable horror.

What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the nonessential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

...the crux of the human condition: our heads are full of dreams, but our behinds drag us down like an anchor.

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

Supposedly, astrology teaches us fatalism: you won't escape your fate! But in my view, astrology (please understand, astrology as a metaphor for life) says something far more subtle: you won't escape your life's theme!

But then he told himself: what does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: the highest morality consists in being useless.

In the end, he more or less came to terms with bare breasts, but he could not escape the impression that something serious had once again happened: on Europe's dial, another hour had struck; shame had disappeared.

He stood in front of Michelangelo's David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy. David, that paradigm of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile!

Laughter is a convulsion of the face, and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason. And that is why the classical sculptor did not express laughter. A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannot be considered beautiful.

Rubens tells himself: laughter is the most democratic of all facial expressions: we differ from one another by our immovable features, but in convulsion we are all the same.

His idea, so obviously correct, cheered him up, whereas I was becoming sadder and sadder: if a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won't be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages?

He was a disc jockey who worked further along the Peninsula and suffered regular crises of conscience about his profession.

He walked out of a party one night because somebody used the word "creampuff," it seemed maliciously, in his hearing. The man was a refugee Hungarian pastry cook talking shop, but there was your Much: thin-skinned. 

"I though son," he said, "I had this feeling. Not telepathy. But rapport with a patient is a curious thing sometimes."

What did she so desire escape from? Such a acpative maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.

San Narcisco lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts - census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vien of a freeway, a vein noruishing the mainline L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.

Either he made up the whole thing, Oedipa though suddenly, or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, t's all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot.

Deferent, he began to narrate for their entertainment a surfer orgy he had been to the week before, involving a five-gallon can of kidney suet, a small automobile with a sun roof, and a trained seal.

Oedipa had believed, long before leaving Kinneret, in some principle of the sea as redemption for Southern California (not, of course, for her own section of the state, which seemed to need none), some unvoiced idea that no matter what you did to its edges the true pacific stayed inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into some more general truth. Perhaps it was only that notion, its arid hope, she sensed as this forenoon they made their seaward thrust, which would stop short of any sea.

"You don't understand, " getting mad. "you guys, you're like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words.  You know where that play exists, no in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you're looking for, but - " a hand emerged from the veil of shower steam to indicate his suspended head - "in here. That's what I'm for. to give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? they're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an acto's memory, right? But the rality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also."

"Teamwork," Koteks snarled, " is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society."

As if the dead really do persists, even in a bottle of wine.

"I'll tell you what I know, then," he decided. " The pin I'm wearing means I'm a member of IA. That's Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all."

"Somebdoy is about to fall in love," Oedipa said, "you go sit with them or something?"

"Right. The whole idea is to get to where you don't need it. I was lucky. I kicked it young. But therer are sixty-year-old men, believe it or not, and women even older, who wake up in the night screaming."

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

Soon as Pierce went off to sport in the surf, Arrabal asked her if he was real, or a spy, or making fun of him. Oedipa didn't understand.

"You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. but another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarachists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allos the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself.

She knew that there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright.

"I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."

"Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for where you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.

The illustrations were woodcuts, executed with that crude haste to see the finished product that marks the amateur. True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.

Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with.

Which begs the question, at what point in the job hunt do you fill out a TSA job application? I've never seen a chipper TSA agent. No one comes from a long, proud line of TSA agents. Nope. The TSA application is filled out after receiving the Walmart rejection letter.

Again, perhaps I am being harsh. Kip Hawley, the previous Administrator for the Transportation Security Administration, remarked in 2007

Clever terrorists can use innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities. But don’t forget that most bombers are not, in fact, clever. Living bomb-makers are usually clever, but the person agreeing to carry it may not be super smart. Even if “all” we do is stop dumb terrorists, we are reducing risk.

Despite Kip's name, this is a no-nonsense man - he title was administrator to an administration. Even Kip doesn't think these radiation junkies can stop clever terrorists. In short, we put up with long lines, stress, minor doses of radiation, naked pictures of our junk being stored on a database, a stranger patting us down and fairly recognizable forms of racial profiling to catch dumb terrorists.

I do hope no dumb terrorists ever try anything against the hyperloop because Elon Musk will have to invent a new form of travel.

May I suggest, HyperZeppelin?

* We have to respect the discipline of a billionaire with the last name Musk not having his own cologne. For comparison, see Trump Steaks.