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Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed…And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

David Foster Wallace

I just want to announce that I know the first paragraph of three fictions by heart: Lolita, The Call Of Cthulhu, and Harry Potter. It’s strange that this feels like an accomplishment even though it wasn’t done consciously.

I’ve been thinking about how much time I waste not really thinking during the day while doing arbitrary tasks and how there should be a text subscription service that sends you a question every day to ponder in your idle minutes. There are so many things that I just don’t have a clear opinion of because I don’t spend enough time thinking about them.

“What would you change if you were Prime Minister?” “What do you think about humans living in space after we exhaust Earth’s resources?” “How is History relevent to you in the present?” “Do you want to learn about things you’ll never be able to do?” “Where do you want to live in old age?” “Did Voldemort have an arguable stance on social constructs?” You know, the important questions.

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human. Not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked a dozen reams of nonsense.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime And Punishment
villere: by Steve Ho

villere:

by Steve Ho

Am I The Only One? by Kent Rogowski

Am I The Only One? by Kent Rogowski

The Frankenfont Project is a limited edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein constructed using only characters and glyphs from PDF files over the internet. The book begins in a mix of Arial, Helvetica, and Times New Roman, and by the end is illegible with specialised typefaces and pictograms.

Vlademir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings x

Who is Achilles without his tendon? Who is Samson without Delilah? Who is Oedipus without his clubfoot? … The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph.

Garth Stein, The Art Of Racing In The Rain

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.

Jeffrey Eugenides

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
orientaltiger: Austin Kleon

orientaltiger:

Austin Kleon

(via orientaltiger)

And as the elevator descends, passing the second floor, and the first floor, going even farther down, I realize that the money doesn’t matter. That all that does is that I want to see the worst.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero