What’s the price of priceless?What’s the price of priceless?
“Sovereign ability consists in knowing the value of things.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Month: October 2013
Daphne GottliebDaphne Gottlieb
“If you die, a dog will wait a week
before eating your corpse. A cat
will wait a day.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “what you eat”
Sometimes you just gotta go way downSometimes you just gotta go way down
Daphne GottliebDaphne Gottlieb
“Some days I am the only
sane person in the world
and I get lonely.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “open water”
CertificateCertificate
A woman sat in a canvas folding
chair by the lake. The day
was still and water calm. Mist
in the sky blurred the horizon.
She held her wallet in her lap. She
opened it and pulled out a folded
sheet of paper, unfolded it,
looked at it, a copy of her birth
certificate. She folded it, returned
it to her wallet, fingered her
drivers license there, closed her
wallet and looked out over the lake.
A few minutes later she opened her
wallet again, pulled her drivers
license out, looked at it, put it
back in her wallet, pulled her
birth certificate out again,
unfolded it and looked at it again.
She lightly ran her fingertips over
the names of her father and her mother,
folded the certificate, returned it to
her wallet and looked at the lake.
Yesterday she ran away from her
husband, literally, running down
the sidewalk in a light drizzle
on a street a few blocks from
the apartment where her father
died when she was seventeen. Two
pedestrians turned and watched as
she ran by. Further up the street,
her husband stood on the sidewalk
and he watched her go.
Tree falling in the forest, variation ∞Tree falling in the forest, variation ∞
”No one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for. Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events which lie outside the possibility of general or even of rare experience—that it is the first language for a new range of experiences. In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustical illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing,” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
And think of the student loan debt one accumulatesAnd think of the student loan debt one accumulates
“One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (trans. Hollingdale)
HardwoodHardwood
The downstairs neighbors are having
a bad day. Last night they had
a bad night. Yesterday, at least
during those parts of the day
when I was at home, they were
having a bad day. The night before
last, etc.
I try not to listen. (I want
to listen!) I try not to press
my ear against the floor and I
am almost always successful.
It hardly matters. This old
building is built like a honeycomb,
sound traveling well up and down
the cells. (They’re shouting now
below me—I want to listen!)
Even without pressing my ear
against the hardwood floor,
I can hear “Fuck!” and “I
told you!” and “Don’t” and
“Help me, you never help me,
I have to do all the fucking”
and then it trails off and
then the dogs bark. Yes, they
have dogs, two of them. They
bark. Sometimes they even howl.
“Fuck” is the word easiest
to hear in this honeycomb. It’s
like the punch of a fist.
Still doing what they canStill doing what they can
“Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful Moorish cultural world of Spain, more closely related to us at bottom, speaking more directly to our senses and taste, than Greece and Rome, was trampled down (—I do not say by what kind of feet—): why? because it was noble, because it owed its origin to manly instincts, because it said Yes to life even in the rare and exquisite treasures of Moorish life!… Later on, the Crusaders fought against something they would have done better to lie down in the dust before—a culture compared with which even our nineteenth century may well think itself very impoverished and very ‘late.’—They wanted booty, to be sure: the Orient was rich…. But let us not be prejudiced! The Crusades—higher piracy, that is all! German knighthood, Viking Knighthood at bottom, was there in its element: the Church knew only too well what German knighthood can be had for…. The German knights, always the ‘Switzers’ of the Church, always in the service of all the bad instincts of the Church—but well paid…. That it is precisely with the aid of German swords, German blood and courage, that the Church has carried on its deadly war against everything noble on earth! A host of painful questions arises at this point. The German aristocracy is virtually missing in the history of higher culture: one can guess the reason…. Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases and ellipses in original)
They bruise easilyThey bruise easily
“A right is a privilege. The privilege of each is determined by the nature of his being. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases. A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The crafts, trade, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in a word the entire compass of professional activity, are in no way compatible with anything other than mediocrity in ability and desires; these things would be out of place among the élite, the instinct pertaining to them is as much opposed to aristocracy as it is to anarchy. To be a public utility, a cog, a function, is a natural vocation, it is not society, it is a kind of happiness of which the great majority are alone capable, which makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre it is happiness to be mediocre; mastery in one thing, specialization, is for them a natural instinct. It would be quite unworthy of a more profound mind to see an objection in mediocrity as such. It is even the prime requirement for the existence of exceptions; a high culture is conditional upon it. When an exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself or his equals, this is not merely politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases in original)