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A world without bumper stickers and tattoos.

I don't like kites.

Clifton Fadiman is a fag.

I'd like to meet myself in a blackout.

"Originality is merely unconscious plagarism." -- from Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge. (He is quoting something else, but he doesn't say where his quote comes from.)

"But study hard what interests you most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible." -- Richard P. Feynman

Leave us some crumbs.

Somebody has stolen my password and is logging into my account to change one letter in one word of my second-to-last blog entry. Every time I change it back, they change it back again. Stop it, goddamnit!

I continue to advocate non-violent sex.

Somewhere there are the keys to my car.

If you can avoid getting stuck in the elevator, do. (The stairwell sometimes smells like stale beer, but the elevator always smells like a caged fart.) I like neither the elevator nor the stairs, and would repel down the side of the building if I were competent enough to tie knots.

Today, while I was standing in the elevator, reading Letter to the Soviet Leaders, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the elevator door suddenly opened to reveal the woman who lives on the fourth floor with the corrosive plastic face. "Are you going up?" she asked. I looked at the panel of buttons to the left of the door. All of the buttons were unlit. "Apparently not," I replied. "Although I could have sworn that I pressed the button." She got in the elevator. "Do you want to go up?" "Yes." "Which floor?" "Three, please." She was smiling at me, trying her best not to laugh at me. "You might have been here all afternoon if I hadn't come along." "Probably, yes."

"To live a life is not to cross a field."-- Boris Pasternak

"All the horror is in just this-- that there is no horror." -- Aleksandr Kuprin

"The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes-- or it prospers; and anon, like snow upon the desert's dusty face lighting a little hour or two-- is gone." -- from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

"A man resolves in accordance with his desire, acts in accordance with his resolve, and turns out to be in accordance with his action . . . A man who's attached goes with his action, to that very place to which hs mind and character cling. Reaching the end of his action, of whatever he has done in this world-- from that world he returns back to this world, back to action . . . That is the course of a man who desires . . . When they are all banished, those desires lurking in one's heart; then a mortal becomes immortal." This is an excerpt from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad.

"For those who would die, there is life." -- Far Journeys, Robert Monroe.

I hate people who hate people.

The Bathhouse, by Mikhail Zoshchenko

They say, citizens, that the public baths in America are excellent. There, for instance, a citizen goes to the bathhouse, takes off his clothes, puts them in a special box and goes happily off to wash. He has nothing to worry about-- there'll be no loss or theft, he won't even take a check for his things.

Perhaps some uneasy American will say to the bath attendant, "Gutbye, please look after my things."

And that's all.

This American will wash, then return to the dressing room and his clean underclothes are handed to him-- all washed and ironed. His undershirt, believe me, is whiter than snow. His drawers are repaired and patched! What a life!

Our baths aren't so bad, either. But worse. However, you can get washed in them.

The only trouble with our baths is the checks. I went to the bathhouse last Saturday (after all, I can't go to America for a bath). They handed me two checks. One for my underwear, the other for my coat and hat.

But where is a naked man to put those checks? Honestly, there's no place for them. You have no pockets. All you have is a belly and legs. What a nuisance those checks are! You can't tie them to your beard.

Well, I tied a check to each leg so as not to lose them right off. And went into the bath.

Now the checks flop around my feet. It's uncomfortable to walk with them. But walk you must. Then you must find yourself a bucket. How can you wash without a bucket? Can't be done.

I look for a pail. I notice a citizen who's washing himself in three buckets. He stands in one, soaps his head in another, and holds onto the third with his left hand so no one will swipe it.

I pulled the third pail toward me, trying to appropriate it, but the citizen wouldn't let go of it.

"What's the idea," he said, "stealing other people's buckets? If I smack you between the eyes with this bucket you won't like it."

I said, "This isn't the czarist regime, that you can go around bashing people with buckets. What selfishness!" I said. "Other people want to get washed, too. This isn't a theater."

But he turned his back to me and went on washing.

What's the use of standing over his soul? I thought. He'll be washing for three days on purpose.

I went further on.

An hour later I noticed a gaffer who had looked away and taken his hand off his bucket. Maybe he had bent down for his soap, or just went off in to a daydream-- I don't know. Only I got his bucket.

Now I had a pail, but there was no place to sit down. And to wash standing up, what kind of a wash is that? It's no good at all.

Well, all right, I had to stand there and wash, holding my bucket in my hand.

And all around me-- Heaven help us-- there was a regular laundry. One fellow was washing his pants, another scrubbing his drawers, a third wringing out something else. And there was such a din from all that laundering that you don't feel like washing. You can't even hear where you're rubbing the soap! It's a mess!

To hell with them! I thought. I'll finish washing at home.

I went back to the dressing room. They handed me my clothes in exchange for the check. Everything is mine, I see, except the pants.

"Citizens," I said, "mine had a hole right here, and look where it is on these."

"We're not here to watch over holes. This isn't a theater," the attendant replied.

Well, all right. I put on the trousers and go to get my coat. They give me the coat . . . they demand the check. And I've left the check on my leg. Have to undress again. I take off the trousers . . . look for the check . . . it's gone. The string is there on my leg, but the paper is gone. Washed away.

I offer the string to the attendant. He won't take it.

"I can't hand out coats for string," he says, "Any citizen can cut up string. There wouldn't be enough coats to go around. Wait until the customers have gone," he says. "I'll give you what's left."

"My dear friend," I say, "what if they leave me a piece of junk? This isn't a theater," I say. "Give me the coat that fits this description. One pocket is torn, the other is missing. As for buttons, the upper one is there, and no one expects any lower ones to be left."

He gave it to me after all. Didn't even take the string. Suddenly I remembered: I had forgotten my soap.

I went back in. They wouldn't let me enter the washroom in my coat.

"Undress," they say.

"Citizens, I can't undress a third time. This isn't a theater. At least let me have the price of the soap."

They won't.

All right, they won't. I leave without the soap.

The reader, perhaps, may be wondering what sort of bathhouse I am describing. Where is it? What's the address?

What bathhouse? The usual sort, where the price of admission is ten kopecks.

Alex, I think I know this one . . . What is frottage or frotteurism?

From Sleep Positions, by Dr. Samuel Dunkell:

"A more complicated case involves a man who was referred to me for treatment after being arrested. He practiced frottage, or frotteurism, from the French word, frotteur, meaning to rub. Frotteurism is a fairly common sexual activity in large cities, where people are often crowded impersonally together in small spaces. Men who practice frottage seek out women on the subways during rush hour, or at large public events like parades, and rub their genitals against them. From my patient I learned that such men refer to themselves and one another as "customers," a term of obscure derivation. Many of these frotteurs know one another, and will occasionally get together to discuss their exploits and techniques.

"Because of special circumstances in his life history, my patient preferred to approach women from the rear, rubbing his organ against a woman's buttock or the backs of her thighs. He particularly enjoyed placing his penis in the gluteal fold, the cleft between the convexities of the buttocks. Wearing a raincoat or long jacket with the pockets cut, he would reach through from inside the pockets to unzip his trousers and withdraw his penis. (Some of the "customers," he told me, would use a penknife or a razor blade to slit the women's pantyhose.) He himself had developed the skill of surreptitiously raising a woman's skirt and pressing himself against her. During the entire procedure, as he rubbed himself against a woman, he would stare off into space as though lost in thought.

"The patient claimed to feel an intense love for the women he used in this way, exemplifying Freud's statement, 'Perhaps nowhere does the omnipotence of love show itself more strongly than it does in the aberrations of love.' Yet there was an ambivalence to his feelings about these women; his hostility was obvious in his need to 'dirty' them by ejaculating on them. Because of his personality problems, he was completely unable to understand why the women themselves could have negative feelings about his practices."

Don't you think you'd feel it if someone were to stick a penis in your gluteal fold? I mean, I hope to never have to prove this in real life, but I would bet an enormous sum of money that, even if my acoster were astute enough to pretend to be lost in thought, I would catch him at his ruse long before he had time enough to dirty me. Before writing this paragraph, I tried to convince myself that there wouldn't be any such thing as a gay frotteur anyway, but I couldn't find any argument that was convincing enough to believe. I've always hated the subway. Which reminds me, there is a passage in an Alan Watts book where he freely admits to a frottage episode on a train in Tokyo. He was fresh off of a stint in a Buddhist monestary, and was feeling immodestly sexually frustrated. Of course, he didn't go as far as lifting the woman's skirt or anything, but there was veritable rubbing involved. Amazingly enough, I didn't find the Watts passage at all disturbing the first time I read it. It is only bothering me now that I am recalling it in this light. If I can find the passage, I'll append it to the bottom of this entry. Goddamnit. I can't even remember which book it's in. Where is the library angel when I need her? Ah, thank you, angel. I now remember which book it's in, but because I don't own the book, there will be no appending. Also, I realize now that it wasn't Watts who initiated the contact. He somehow subliminally persuaded her to rub up against him. Imagine that. If anyone had been arrested, it would have been the woman. I'll tell you what I'd like to do. I'd like to catch the library angel down in the bookstacks and hump her leg for awhile. God, she must be spectacular.

Self-hypnosis

It is now 3:56 am. Twenty minutes ago I finished a book on self-hypnosis, and then I put down the book and tried to hypnotize myself, and I was fully hypnotized in about one minute. I find a number of things surprising about this experience: first, how easy it is to accomplish; second, how strong your will feels when you are hypnotized: there is this dull conviction that you can do anything you tell yourself to do. Before I succeeded, I was having neurotic doubts about things like, "What if I tell myself that I cannot lift my right arm and then it becomes paralyzed permanently?" Such thoughts fall under the general category of self-sabotage, and I, for one, think them all the time. Usually they involve vicinal fourteen year-old girls. I'll be eating dinner for instance, and I'll start to worry about not looking at the fourteen year-old girl who is sitting at the table across from me, and about the fact that I, myself, and the entire restaurant, would think that I am a pedophile if I were to start looking at the fourteen year-old girl, and then, low and behold, before I know it, I have spent my whole meal staring at the fourteen year-old girl. But even in such extreme instances, the problem is not that I am a pedophile. It is that I find it difficult to resist self-torture-- that is, I will take almost any opportunity to torture myself. Apparently, I do this not because it is rewarding, but because I cannot keep myself from doing so. I wasn't aware of how true this was until what is now about 30 minutes ago. This fact became obvious as soon as I was hypnotized because this feature of my personality completely dissolved, right in front of my eyes, so to speak. The inner strength that I felt was beyond words: I simply can't describe it. Of course, now I am sitting here thinking, "I wonder if I am jinxing myself by writing this entry; I wonder if I won't be able to hypnotize myself anymore," which is not unlike the thought I had right before I went under, "What if I tell myself to kill somebody while I'm under? Will I have my incapacity available as a defense afterwards?" These thoughts, they are all in the same vein. I have always thought that they were both entertaining and germane to the human condition, but it seems to me now that they are neither of these things. Instead, they are self-limiting, and in fact, many people probably don't ever subject themselves to such thoughts. I have a number of interesting observations from my first hypnosis experience. The book said that the hypnotized subject feels a pervasive sense of lightness or heaviness; for me, it was lightness-- that was how I knew that I had gone under; it was how I knew, for instance, that I would not be able to lift my right arm when I told myself that I wouldn't be able to lift it. Also, my penis became fully erect within 5 seconds of full hypnosis. I wonder if that will happen every time, or if that was a unique occurrence. The erection seemed to be a part of the general bodily ethereality. But the hallmark of the experience, the thing that I find most compelling, is the inner strength that I felt, the strength of will. It was a feeling of complete assurance. The complete absence of self-doubt. Even when my conscious mind tried to insert thoughts like, "Maybe I won't be able to sit up in bed when I want to be able to," my subconscious mind somehow managed to stifle them. It was as if somebody else were trying to voice them from without a hermetically sealed window, so that I could read their lips and watch them gesticulate, but couldn't hear their words. The realization that such patently inimical thoughts are fundamental to my personality was not a little surprising, although I certainly shouldn't have been surprised if I had thought about it. Now I am wondering, first, whether I can hypnotize these thoughts away, and more unbelievably, I am also wondering whether or not I want to be rid of them. Maybe I don't want to lose my neuroses. I can't imagine why not, but the thought has crossed my mind, so I figured that I might as well relate it in due course. At any rate, I am not quite sure where to put this experience. I am pretty sure that I don't yet have a proper place for it. One thing that I have learned tonight is that our identities are grotesquely self-limiting. For better or worse, we are in the habit of giving our conscious mind free reign over the decision as to which thoughts and beliefs and perceptions are allowed us. I suspect, in fact, that the feeling of strength and composure that I was feeling was essentially a freeing of myself from the tyranny of my conscious mind-- that is, from my identity. My goal had been a simple one: to hypnotize myself into falling asleep, but after I was hypnotized, I didn't feel anything like myself, and I didn't want to fall asleep because I didn't want to lose myself for the entire time that I would be asleep, a concern which seems to me, even in hindsight, to be squarely reasonable. After all, I am not used to losing my identity during my sleep. I don't know what would come of that. I could imagine that such a condition would lend itself to some pretty unusual dreams. What a feeling, to have misplaced one's identity, as if it were a cellphone or a set of keys! In closing, I haven't reread what I have written yet, but I know that it is unparagraphed, and I would imagine that it is relatively incoherent and that my hypothetical reader is by now feeling more than a little incredulous. I will do nothing to try to dispel that incredulity. Just imagine for yourself how unbelievable it would feel to be inside of your body but outside of yourself. To date, this is the most inexplicable experience of my life. I am trying to find a way to describe it, but I don't know that I can. The sensation was that my head had evaporated. I suppose that your identity is associated with your head, and especially when you get to feeling small, you are feeling small within your head. Well, imagine that your mind is somehow able to break through these constraints. That is the physical sensation that I had, which isn't to say that there is a mind/body dualism problem going on here. There isn't, or at least I don't think that there is. What is going on is the realization that wrapped up in your conceptual head is your identity, and that, if you can rid yourself of these encumbrances, you can bring yourself to a place where there is possibility beyond what are your normal expectations. Perhaps the point to make is that we have conditioned ourselves to underestimate our own potential. It is apparently true that we have some innate physical abilities that we have grown accustomed to not using. Whether they were trained into disuse or whether they were never properly developed, I don't know.

On Sleep

From Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep-- In his preface, Dement refers to sleep as "the 'short death' we call sleep." What is he quoting? Is that just a colloquialism, or is it a full-blown quote?

"In Czarist Russia, the nobility usually went to bed with a small pillow called a doumka-- which means, the one you tell your thoughts to." -- from Sleep Positions, by Samuel Dunkell, M.D.

Thomas Hobbes "did much of his thinking in bed, and is reported to have scribbled his ideas and mathematical formulae on the bedsheets and even on his own thighs." -- Sleep Positions, Dunkell.

"Many tribal cultures have specific taboos about disturbing the sleeping mat of a person who is away on a hunt or at war, fearing that the spirit will not have a place to return to and that the hunter will therefore die." -- Sleep Positions, Dunkell, M.D.

According to Dr. Dunkell, Guy de Maupassant writes, "The bed, my friend, is our whole life. It is there that we are born, it is there that we love, it is there that we die." I don't recognize the quote. If the source is familiar to anyone who reads this, please let me know. I would try emailing Dr. Dunkell, but judging by when his book went to press, my guess is that he has already been dead for a few years. I'm laying odds of 50,000 to 1 on this one-- not on Dr. Dunkell's being alive, but instead, on the probability that somebody will both read this and know from where the good doctor gets his quote.

"In past centuries, the nobility often required a servant to get into bed before they did, acting as a human hors d'oeuvre long enough to satisfy the bedbugs' hunger, so that the noble could slip into bed and fall asleep undisturbed by the temporarily satiated tiny tormentors." -- Sleep Positions.

Says Dr. Dunkell-- laboratory tests have shown that sleep under glaring light conditions is neither as profound nor as refreshing. No cite given. This one may be worth researching . . .

"The good are those who content themselves with dreaming of what the wicked actually do." -- from Plato, by way of Self-Hypnosis (Melvin Powers); cite not given; also, I will give no excuse for reading this book.

"For those who are awake, only one world exists. During sleep, everyone returns to his own." -- from Heraclitus, by way of Self-Hypnosis.

Worst poem ever written

My Ocean

Is where I crash with something
unkown and beg for more;
where salt stings my eyes and
knowingly I return;
where I am cautioned of jellyfish
along the ocean floor and still I grip
the sand for every fresh new step.
when the temptation of crystal clear
waters presents itself with such vastness
only a fool would deny it, for no place
else will there every (sic) be such clarity.

Cancun, Mexico
5/00

M. Gutman

nothing to write about

The hard part about writing is that it requires that you have something to say. Whether or not you feel like doing so, you can't very well write unless there are actually thoughts floating along, however bloated, in your thin stream of consciousness.

Sometimes I feel like I have plenty of things to put down on paper. Those occasions rarely coincide with those other times when I find myself in possession of paper, pen, and patience enough to use them.

Unfortunately, I usually have my most prolific moments when I am behind the wheel of an automobile, or scrubbing my testicles in the shower, which, as it turns out, I am pretty persistent about doing. I am meaning to mention this parenthetically. My father always says that it sounds like I am abusing myself in the shower, and in fact, will often take a careful moment to remind me not to scrub too vigorously when guests are near-at-hand. And he has many times wondered out-loud what happens when he is not around to remind me about my showering overtures, about not making them, about not cleaning myself too vigorously-- especially during those peculiar instances when I am the guest in somebody else's shower. What on Earth will your host think of you if he thinks that you are masturbating in his shower? That is my father's rhetorical question.

The problem with getting your moments of inspiration under these conditions is self-evident, I think. It is that preserving your thoughts would involve getting soap on your pencil and paper, or crashing your car in mid-sentence. When I was in school, I tried to get around this later scenario by bringing a tape recorder in my car, but the only thing that I got out of it was a really funny catalogue of all of the church names on Figueroa between Imperial Boulevard and Exposition. There are a lot of them, so many, in fact, that compiling the list required six commutes, separate viewings for each side of the street, and so much double-checking that the list never was, in fact, ever entirely compiled. But the tape must still exist somewhere.

Of course, the bottom line is, if you have nothing to write about when you sit down to write, then you are probably giving yourself too much credit at all other times. It might just be true that you have nothing on your mind whether you are steering your car or scrubbing your testicles, or waiting in line at the supermarket-- wondering if the people who work there can possibly be as stupid as they look. It might just be true that what is going on here is that I am giving myself more credit than I am giving them. In the end, though, I quickly come to realize that I have plenty to say: it just takes me awhile to get started. In closing, I feel like I should add an explanation for why I scrub my balls so vigorously when I get the chance to do so. It is recidivist behavior, really. When I do this, I am reverting back to the time when I really did need to scrub my balls because they really did smell like something awful.

This will require additional explaining. You see, I used to eat a lot of cheese. For instance, when I lived in New York city, at one stretch, I once ate pizza for dinner every night for a whole month. I was sampling the pizza places in and around Gramercy Park, and there were plenty of them to sample. Gramercy Park might sound nice, but Union Square is right there. And then, when we moved to Tribeca, I switched my diet abruptly, from pizza to quesadillas, which still meant that my diet consisted mostly of cheese-- that is the point to take away from this discussion. I ate plenty of cheese in those days, so much cheese that I developed a food alergy.

Before long, my body started reacting violently to cheese. If I ate any significant amount of cheese, I would get zits and pimples and what not. It was like I was still in high school. And also, my balls would smell. And you know what the strange thing is? It is that my balls would smell exactly like a dirty pussy. Now I know this as well as you do: we are now somewhere incredibly far beyond the point where the blog entry went spiralling out of control. It happened long ago. By now it is clear that any subsequent talk will be much too vulgar for anything but the Internet; it's just more fuel for the Women's Temperance Union and whoever else has joined them on the far right; but also, it's true. My balls smelled just like a pussy. Isn't that odd? Wouldn't you expect them to smell like something else-- at least if the factual cause was my excessive cheese consumption? I mean, I could understand it if you wanted to argue that the true cause was otherwise, that it was actually bacteria endemic to the genitals, and that the bacteria would tend to be the same between the legs of both sexes-- especially if both parties are frequently in the mood to commingle fluids. But if I'm right about the cheese being the cause, then we might be on the verge of a real breakthrough here.

There is a logical consequence to this train of thought, a conjecture, a surmise. However bald it appears to be on the surface-- what if it is true? What if pussies smell bad because girls eat too much cheese? I mean, some don't smell bad at all. Some of them even smell good. Maybe the caretakers of those pussies don't eat cheese. Maybe they are Vegan, or lactose intolerant, or blue-haired teetotalers, or maybe they don't eat much cheese for reasons of personal preference. But what about women who drink a lot of milk, or consume too many dairy products in some other form-- lots of butter maybe, or chocolate-- do they suffer the same fate? Just think about the number of women there are out there who are addicted to chocolate. At any rate, that is why I scrub my balls vigorously. And here I want to make this quite clear: It is not because they still smell; they don't. My balls do not smell bad. Not anymore at least, except when I eat cheese. The truth is that I scrub my balls loudly and for a long time because I can't seem to break the habit, which, as you know because I have thoroughly explained it to you already, is a practically harmless holdover from an earlier period of my life when my balls did smell really bad.

Overheard in New York

From the Overheard in New York website:

"Girl: I really enjoy going to movies by myself these days. Most of the guys I date, we don't have the same taste in movies.
Guy: That's a great idea. Plus, you don't get some weirdo trying to
"inadvertantly" place your hand on his cock.

--L train

Guy: You know Spring is here when I shave my balls.

--CUNY Graduate Center, 42nd & 5th

Girl: Do you sell tights with feet?
Store chick: Sorry, we only sell stuff that's trendy.

--Urban Outfitters, 14th & 6th

Teen girl: You know, relationships are a lot like the British government. The queen thinks she's in charge, but the prime minister has all the power.
Teen boy: I wonder if people in the real world are subjected to this kind of conversation.

--Stuyvesant High School, Chambers Street

Guy #1: Oh, that really sucks. So she wouldn't even blow you? After all that?
Guy #2: Nope.
Guy #1: Did she at least finish putting up those shelves in your closet?

--51st & 2nd

Hobo: You have a quarter for a cup of coffee?
Suit: Excuse me, can't you see I'm on the phone?
Hobo: I don't have time for games!

--42nd & 7th

Girl #1: Randy won't stop coming on my face.
Girl #2: ...Are you going to finish your bagel?

--Waverly & University

Man: You could turn people to stone with your eyes.
Girl: Dude, there are lots of other people on this train, go hit on someone else.
Man: I know, but you're the closest and I don't want to move because I have to pee.

--2 train

Conductor: Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. Would Isaiah Santiago please step off the train? The police are waiting for you.

--1 train

Homey #1: Yo, hold up...Jesus was a virgin?! He went from 12 to 33 with nothing?
Homey #2: Fuck that shit. He definitely got his dick sucked or buttfucked some bitches.

--L Train, 8th Avenue

The subway doors open. A hobo enters, holding a bottle of windex in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other. He says: Which is the better time to read Dostyevsky? Winter?

He sprays the windex.

Hobo: Or Spring?

He squeezes toothpaste out of the tube.

Japanese girl: Spring!
Hobo: You are correct.

--F train"

For more, visit http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/

Johnson on . . .

Actors and Lawyers (and Swift) -- "Boswell. 'You say, Dr. Johnson, that Garrick exhibits himself for a shilling. In this respect he is only on a footing with a lawyer who exhibits himself for his fee, and even will maintain any nonsense or absurdity, if the case requires it. Garrick refuses a play or a part which he does not like; a lawyer never refuses.' Johnson. 'Why, sir, what does this prove? Only that a lawyer is worse. Boswell is now like Jack in "The Tale of a Tub," who, when he is puzzled by an argument, hangs himself. He thinks I shall cut him down, but I will let him hang."

Death and mourning -- "When Hester Thrale had news that a cousin had died in America, Johnson thought her sorrow was merely put on for the sake of appearances: 'Prithee, my dear, have done with canting; how would the world be the worse for it, I may ask, if all of your relations were at once spitted like larks, and roasted for Presto's supper?' (Thrale explained, 'Presto was the dog that lay under the table while we talked.')

Egalitarianism -- "'It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality."

Happiness -- "'He this day enlarged upon Pope's melancoly remark, 'Man never is, but always to be blest.' He asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as part of every life, of which we are conscious, was at some point in time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope. Being pressed upon this subject, and asked if he really was of opinion, that though, in general, happiness was very rare in human life, a man was not sometimes happy in the moment present, he answered, 'Never, but when he is drunk.'

[In short, man is never happy but when he is drunk.]

(Boswell later revisits this conversation.) "'Sir, you observed one day at General Oglethorpe's that a man is never happy for the present, but when he is drunk. Will you not add,-- or when driving rapidly in a postchaise?' Johnson. 'No, Sir, you are driving rapidly from something or to something.'"

"'The world in its best state is nothing more than a larger assembly of beings, combining to counterfeit happiness that they do not feel.'"

Insipidity -- "'Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both."

"Late in his life, two ladies visited him and 'repeated a speech of some length previously prepared for the occasion. It was an enthusiastic effusion, which when the speaker had finished, she panted for her idol's reply.' Johnson's answer was brief. 'Fiddle-de-dee, my dear.'"

Popular Intelligence -- "'Sir, it will be much exaggerated in popular talk: for, in the first place, the common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to the objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts: they do not mean to lie, but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial. If anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle, and in this way they go on.'"

Reading and Writing -- "'When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.'"

Sailors -- "'No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being on a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned.'"

Self-deprecation -- "'A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused, and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion."

Skimming -- (He is talking about a travel book that he has been skimming.) "'[It is as good as any other travel book] that you will take up. I have not, indeed, cut the leaves yet; but I have read in them where the pages are open, and I do not suppose that what is in the pages which are closed is worse than what is in the open pages.'"

Subordination -- "'So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.'"

Swift's Gulliver's Travels -- "'When once you have thought of big and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.'"