Excerpts and Notes

"Am I still alone in this world?
Ready to burst into tears,
or-- is there a witness?" -- Boris Pasternak

"The attitude towards women is the litmus test for any ethical system." -- Shalamov, Kolyma Tales [What exactly the litmus test is supposed to be testing here is never said. But the bottom line is that any ethical system will be incoherent unless women are contemplated in a positive light. It just can't be a functional system if fully half of your population is considered to be inferior. As a sort of corollary, it might also be true that your system is insupportable if anybody is marginalized ex ante.]


"All is imaginary-- family, office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell." -- Kafka, The Basic Kafka


"Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself." -- Kafka, The Basic Kafka (from a letter to Milena.)


"Everyone now knows how dangerous swallowing stones is . . ." -- Daniil Kharms, Incidences

"What's so great about flowers? You get a significantly better smell from between women's legs." -- Daniil Kharms, from his notebooks.

"Behind a screen I took off my shoes and stretched out on the cot. I had to concentrate. Otherwise the contours of reality might become hopelessly lost. Suddenly, I saw myself from the outside, distracted and absurd. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why am I lying behind a screen waiting for God knows what? And how stupidly my life is going." -- The Compromise, Sergei Dovlatov

"'You know,' I said, 'In our circumstances, it may be more fitting to lose than to win.' -- The Compromise, Sergei Dovlatov

"Just then, silently and not very fast, a red-and-blue ball rolled in through the door, followed one leg of a right triangle straight under the cot, disappeared for an instant, thumped against the chamber pot, and rolled out along the other cathetus-- that is, toward Rodion, who all without noticing it, happened to kick it as he took a step; then, following the hypotenuse, the ball departed into the same chink through which it had entered." -- from Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov

Richard Feynman, describing the meetings that the committee held during the final stages of the Space Shuttle Challenger hearings--

"Perhaps that's a very efficient way to get a report out quickly. But we spent meeting after meeting doing this wordsmithing [or editing of grammar and syntax, etc.] And every once in a while, we'd interrupt that to discuss the typography and the color of the cover. And after each discussion, we were asked to vote. I thought it would be most efficient to vote for the same color we had decided on in the meeting before, but it turned out [that] I was always in the minority! We finally chose red. (It came out blue.)" Source: Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think?

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell." -- a Buddhist proverb taken from What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Kafka, on parables . . ."All these parables merely set out to say that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already."

Authors who were killed or otherwise injured in a duel: Mihail Lermontov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Prosper Merimee.

Authors who would have rather been killed in a duel: Ernest Hemingway.

gnostic turpitude -- spiritual or intellectual, or perhaps more accurately, social depravity. In Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, "gnostic turpitude" is the crime for which the protagonist, Cincinnatus, is condemned to death. The word, 'gnostic', means, "of or relating to spiritual or intellectual knowledge," while 'turpitude' is a condition of baseness or depravity; but defining this phrase is not as easy as combining the definitions of its member words. It is a little more difficult to describe exactly what Nabokov means. What Nabokov means to convey is that Cincinnatus, if he is guilty of anything at all, is guilty only of being unable to follow autonomically the rules of the applicable social contract. In other words, Cincinnatus cannot adhere to social norms without making a conscious effort to do so. Such behavior does not come naturally to Cincinnatus, but instead, his adherence comes only by deliberate effort. Also, it is important to the definition that C's persecutors deem his guilt to be a spiritual matter. To them, the matter is spiritual just because they do collectively submit to this code of conduct in an instinctive or involuntary way: their adherence to the social contract is effortless. As for Cincinnatus, he acquired his handicap when he was born into circumstances that left him with malfunctioning social instruments-- thus, he became a pariah early on-- and to the extent that he has been capable, in his later life, of abiding by the terms of the social contract, he has managed to do so only in a labored and self-conscious way. In the eyes of his persecutors, this makes him guilty in the same way that a parishioner can be guilty when he thinks bad thoughts that will never be manifested in action. His guilt does not require action. He is a miscreant by default. So Cincinnatus is being executed, not for committing a crime, but for being himself.

Dear Vladimir,

Not everything is syncopated.

Sincerely,
Chambers

"We realized that life, even the worst life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there was no need to fear the failures more than the successes." -- Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

"Something unknown is doing something we know not what." -- Eddington, physicist, from Feynman's Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman



"I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil." -- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast