Additional Glosses
Certain things easily fall in the hands of imbeciles, and when they do, disaster ensues. The usual victims include: Science, religion, tradition, phrases like "material and spiritual”, “some things can’t be explained." Among others.
When one notes to people that the material and the spiritual exists within the realistic realm and is supposed to be thought of within the realistic realm, they just don’t get it. They want to apply it to everything and anything. You give people words and they run off with them applying them in areas they aren’t even supposed to do so. The same applies to the phrase “some things can’t be explained.” You’ll find people using the phrase “some things cant be explained” when speaking about nonsense make-believe things like witchcraft.
Some think when you speak of realism, you deprive them of the spiritual. This is false.
My contemporaries have suffered with the “zeitgeist fallacy”, the “age-mate fallacy”, and the “phase fallacy.”
The industrial area is the most soulless part of every contemporary town.
In this century, with cities planned so grotesquely and buildings designed so hideously, one struggles to find a location in which to place one’s home.
It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities—it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.
Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, we must start over.
To scandalize many today, it suffices to suggest to them that they renounce something.
Skepticism to strangle idols & impede their unceasing enthronement. Poetry to seduce souls.
Unlimited gullibility is required to be able to believe that any social condition can be improved in any other way than slowly, gradually, and involuntarily.
The wealthy man’s sin is not his wealth, but the importance he attributes to it.
The semi-educated man builds altars to technology.
Whoever takes pride in “having lived through a lot” should keep quiet so as not to prove to us that he has understood nothing.
From the slums of life one returns not wiser, but dirtier.
Man does not find himself thrown only among objects. He is also immersed in religious experiences.
The psychiatrist considers only vulgar behavior sane.
Modern man imagines that it is sufficient to open the windows in order to cure the soul’s infection, that it is not necessary to clear out the trash.
Vulgarity consists as much in disrespecting what deserves respect as in respecting what does not deserve it.
Prose and good manners are inseparable.
To reform society through laws is the dream of the incautious citizen and the discrete preamble to every tyranny. Law is the juridical form of custom or the trampling of liberty.
For the Marxist, rebelliousness in non-Communist societies is a sociological fact—where the “exploited" rebel—and in Communist society a merely psychological fact—where the “traitors” reveal themselves.
Statistics are the tool of the man who renounces understanding in favor of manipulation.
For the fool, only those behaviors which conform to the latest fashionable theory in psychology are authentic. The fool, upon observing himself, always views himself as corroborating experimentally whatever stupidity he presumes to be scientific.
History is what is reconstructed by an imagination capable of thinking the consciousness of others. The rest is politics.
History that refrains from attaching whys to events spares us the prejudices/fashions of the time. The historian should either present historical events like a football commentator, narrate historical events with literary tact, or remain mute.
To hope that the growing vulnerability of a world increasingly integrated by technology will not demand a total despotism is mere foolishness.
Prose lacking in good manners and sobriety fails to satiate. We demand of the book we read not just talent, but also good breeding.
Nothing makes more evident the reality of sin than the stench of souls that deny its existence.
The sinister structure of arguments in favor of the radical absurdity of the world wavers in the presence of the lightest thing that fulfills us.
Whoever does not turn his back on the contemporary world dishonors himself.
He who understands least is he who stubbornly insists on understanding more than can be understood.
Modern man already knows that political solutions are ludicrous and suspects that economic solutions are too.
Nobody thinks seriously as long as originality matters to him.
Poetry which disdains poetic musicality becomes petrified in a graveyard of images.
My faith fills my solitude with its hushed whisper of invisible life.
The modern state fabricates the opinions which it later respectfully collects under the name of public opinion.
A sentence should be hard like a rock and shake like a branch.
The anonymity of the modern city is as intolerable as the familiarity of modern customs. Life should resemble a salon of people with good manners, where all know each other but where none hug each other.
To domesticate man all one has to do is politicize all his gestures.