[From] a line from Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star: “…as if time were not a river but an earthquake happening nearby.” It’s an arresting thought: What if time’s ravages compelled our attention with the same ineluctable force as an earthquake? What if time were experienced not as a flow but as a phenomenon whose energy overcomes you, terrifies you, forces you to reach out in search of balance?
Jonathan Mingle, The Unimaginable Touch of Time (NYRB, February 10, 2022)
National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion…. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
Who knows how many ... people in this world still think they are being threatened by some conspiracy? Here's a form to be filled out at will, by each person with his own conspiracy.... What does everyone desire, and desire more fervently the more wretched and unfortunate they are? To earn money easily, to have power (the enormous pleasure in commanding and humiliating your fellow man) and to avenge every wrong suffered (everyone in life has suffered at least one wrong, however small it might be).... But why; everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit..... [T]he explanation for their failure. It was some one else... who planned your ruin.
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
People without a sense of humor will never forgive you for being funny.
Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club
What’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons
The human mind is not simply an instrument of conscious cognition that can be detached from its organic base. It is a locus of feeling, conscious and unconscious, flowing directly from a somatic foundation.... Where humans differ most from other animals may be in our capacity and need for illusion.
John Gray, The Mind’s Body Problem (NYRB, December 2, 2021)
