The concept of entropy is bodied forth in language: what once blazed with significance is now cold and dull in our mouths.
If clichés travelled as light does, somewhere in the galaxy it would be possible to look on them as they shone formerly, with the dazzle of revelation.
We search in vain for life among the stars, and do not know what our shit encounters when it hits the bottom of the ocean.
Banter: what oft was thought but ne’er deemed worth expressing.
The sexual allure of the cinema rests on a partial overwhelming of the senses. If the smell of a movie star were amplified in proportion to the image, we would settle more happily for our sublunary lovers.
In idleness the meanest tasks grow monstrous and we fly to work to escape the burdens of leisure.
The foam, the roar, the churn of sprinting water. Sitting on this rocky ledge, staring into the white rush, my ears clogged with it: like a dream of water, in which I am fully awake.
He got away with his crime. The luck of it pursued him as relentlessly as any Fury.
Perhaps only negative perfection is possible. The most luminous success cannot boast the integrity of complete failure.
At least he had the decency to hate himself: is there a hypocrite to match a self-approving misanthrope?
There are abysses into which we are not permitted not to look – if only for the length of time it takes to fall down them.
“Who could have foreseen [enter the latest fuck-up].” How many falls, how many slumps and crashes, before we accept that gravity applies to all our systems?
Whatever bears up to frequent repetition is probably worth repeating.
We cannot prepare ourselves for our own ends. Even the gravedigger is a novice in death.
No wonder so many writers drink: day after day at the page, decanting one book into another…
As austerity bites, it will be the middle classes that riot. For your expectations to be dashed, you need first to have had some.
Miserabilists should be silent. Too many that profess their contempt for the world do so in hope of its admiration.
It makes sense that we should kick a man when he’s down. When he’s standing we might do ourselves an injury.
Powerless against those that tread on us, we stamp our feet on those below. What trickles down of wealth is not money but grievance.
The illusions that we entertain will not reciprocate.
Midterms in America – and voters, furious at their physician’s ineffective treatment, raid the medicine cabinet for the bottle that poisoned them.
Larkin’s “desire of oblivion” runs deep: perhaps every city aspires to become its own ruins.
Unlike writers, a field does not grow anxious while it lies fallow.
Birdsong rebuilt what sleep dismantled. Asserting his territory, the thrush showed me mine.
Life, that has no reason for being, cannot get enough of itself, and it is human pride that refuses to call this delight.
We can be motivated to save as little as a field, but no one is moved to action over a mountain of data.
Views can be blinkers. Knowing what we think, we may fail to think through what we know.
As things stand, hoping for the Earth is like asking for the moon.
Cornucopians dream perpetual abundance; deep ecologists predict apocalypse. Both are mistaken. There will be no end, only painful presents.
Perhaps death is no more than waking up in the element whence we came.
Don’t ask, lest you be told and lose your appetite.
How I dread unpleasantness: I get toothache at the very thought of the bullet I must bite.
In my grandmother’s edition of La Bruyère, I find her student marginalia and the redolence of a lost apartment. The electronic book is all very well; yet I doubt many readers will shed a tear over the smell of an old one.
There are philosophers who devote their talents to ignoring what is needful. In this regard, the world has long been governed by philosopher-kings.
We look to power to remedy error, but error is power’s currency of action. All it can do is manufacture new errors under which to conceal the old.
Reality is merely the impossibility in which the world has chosen to invest.
No matter how often we smile at our reflections, we will never win over the mirror.
War, that does not work, never ceases to function. One might almost marvel at its tireless operation, until one considers the insatiability of the cancer cell.
You won’t catch him grinning for his photograph. He knows how it plans to pain him, in the fullness of time.
Never apologise. Never explain. Because you’re a sociopath.
From rice to rye, wheat to corn, and all meat reared on the same, we are in essence herbivores. Let us pursue our holocausts of grass: patiently, implacably, it will grow over us.
When proscribed virtual realities emerge, new cartels will form that look on narcotics with contempt. Technology doesn’t solve problems, merely displaces them.
Happiness writes white – but white refracted reveals all the colours in the rainbow.
The dream of Armageddon is rooted in narcissism. A modest man feels no need to drag the world into his grave.
There are no full stops in nature.
Radicalism has the security of one constant: the status quo is always unacceptable.
The truth will out. Our work in the meantime is to ensure that, when it does, it hurts as little as possible.
An aphorism is a remark that has won itself some elbow room.
Innocence cannot mean immunity. The sins of the father will cease to be inherited when the same is true of the sorrows.
Giving up meat is one step we can take towards a bloodless existence, but how much harder it is to extricate ourselves from systems that make us all cannibals by degrees.
There are forms of absorption that are outwardly focused. The novel-gazing of writers, for instance…
From a field of sheep I conclude: it’s not that animals can’t stare down humans, it’s that only humans have anything to prove by the experiment.
The joy of environmentalism: in its victories even the defeated have won. For the sorrow, read above and substitute three antonyms.
We need the dark in the cinema, in the theatre, for when we watch ourselves watching we cannot see.
Time does not heal all wounds. It just closes up the scar tissue.
Blundering, this birdwatcher can empty a wood. The beasts of the world know us better than we know them.
As we cling to our belongings, we lose our sense of belonging and commerce pitches more belongings as the solution. The divide between salesman and pusher is mostly statutory.
They say time gives us the face that we deserve; so does the plastic surgeon.
Word and world do not coincide. Perhaps the lion through its mighty yawn recalls Adam’s attempt to name it.
For instance, in 2010, while Pakistan drowns and Russia burns, we will invest ten times more in fossil fuels than in renewables. When future generations ask what we were thinking, they will be paying us an unmerited compliment.
It seems possible that the founding question of religion is not “does god exist”. Perhaps our ancestors invented god so that, believing itself to be observed, humanity might be sure of its own existence.
“The love of liberty,” wrote Hazlitt, “is the love of others.” There’s another writer you won’t find on a libertarian’s bookshelf.
The blog is truly egalitarian, offering us all a share in the loneliness of lacking readers.
Literature is that which survives its exegetes.
We are all dying. The trick is to do it as slowly as possible.
My right ear, which cannot make out a dear friend in the pub, won’t spare me the mutterings of my neighbour in the library. Similarly, though I walk past the fragrance from a rosebush, the smallest crust of dogshit on my shoe reeks to me from a room away. When you’re this tuned to the negative, any pos
itive thinking deserves a standing ovation.
Science, for all its advances, will never provide us with virtual water.
My wife wants me to acknowledge my sources. That would solve the problem of bulking out my books.
The specific dissolves the general. Labels are best left on bananas.
Too good a talker to be a writer, he burned up every impulse towards the page.
Lest they confuse the plain with the simple, campaigners for plain English should consider the words: “Is not”.
What if arcadia is a place, not of refuge, but of protest?
For a century, Prometheus raged against the eagle. Gradually his suffering evolved, and that ravening beak, those piercing talons, became his reason for being, the reminder of his disobedience. At the summit of a thousand years, the eagle’s visits had become his due; for only when it tore into his liver was Prometheus restored to his sun-addled self. The gods, when they came to unchain him, intended it not as liberation but as the ultimate refinement of their retribution.
The masochist can come to love most pains except himself.
Concision is a virtue only in part. The aphorism, in its brevity, also shrugs off the burden of proof.
I would prefer not to show my work in progress. Some novels, like mushrooms, grow best in the dark.
Ecological alert from the oceans! Our plastic is seriously contaminated with seawater.
Arrian recounts that Alexander the Great endured the rebuke of an Indian philosopher. “You roam presumptuously over the world, giving no rest to yourself or others. Yet soon you will die, and possess no more of the earth than suffices for your burial.” Alexander praised his critic, accepted the reproof of a conquered people – then resumed his conquests. There is no truth that can be spoken to power that power cannot cheerfully ignore.
John Clare suffered two enclosures: first in fences, then in fashion.
Or let there be another version. The gods did not punish Prometheus but made him watch as, down the ages, humans set the world alight; until, standing in the ashes of his hopes for mortals, Prometheus fledged an eagle and begged the gods to chain him to his rock.
What motivates a vandal? Envy and spite, but also perhaps the maddening persistence of objects – the idiot avenging himself on the world for its readiness to outlast him.
No revelation sparkles brighter than the one scribbled down from sleep, nor looks duller when revisited by the light of day. What we dream is the image of meaning. The object eludes us.
In all of us lurks the genius who knows exactly what we mean… if only we had the means to understand him.
Our hopes may be raised for us, but only we can lift our heads above the parapet.
America will get there in the end – but by the end we’ll be finished.
The worst have their passionate intensity and the struggle is not between faith and unbelief but between moderation and extremism.
Our ultimate regret – that everything passes – may also prove our last consolation.
That rattling at your door is the zombie, ambition, refusing to grant you the peace of its grave.
You wouldn’t presume to take up an hour of a stranger’s life with stories from your own; so what’s with expecting two whole weeks for one of your fictions?
Just read “sales assistant” as “slaves assistant” – though which of us is meant I can’t be sure.
Happiness is a by-product. Make it your goal and you will always shoot wide.
Those who deny the existence of ghosts must forget their dreams the moment they waken.
It is easier to feel guilty than to change. So long as we sprinkle it with remorse, surely we can have our sin cake and eat it?
Waited an hour for the bus and nothing came along but this poxy sentence.
Sun leaf and birdsong: a soft day with no need for hope, for life seems already to have delivered.
With his cold eye, hard nose and sharp elbows, he is the model citizen of his gated community.
We can all change for the better, but loss is the stronger current.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: should we prefer transformation into an olive tree or a nightingale to the shape-shifting that age has in store for us?
Good prose is like a windowpane, wrote Orwell, which may be why reading the newspaper so often feels like slashing our wrists on broken glass.
All morning tidying my life into little drawers. One day I will be tidied into a little drawer of my own.
Oh! for a time machine to fetch Thomas Paine – that he might confound those who invoke him in defence of their inanities.
Stand well back from the man who thinks he is not comic.
Familiarity can also breed comfort. Finding myself alone for the evening, I curl up with a cup of tea in front of The Shining.
Time is despotic. Visiting my grandmother in the geriatric ward, I felt like a Red Cross inspector in the gulag of old age.
There is vanity in self-reproach: why should you be immune to human failure?
The path from youthful Trot to rightwing hack is well trodden. What does not change about the mind is its set.
Talk about overkill. Given what we know about human beings and reality, climate change denial has spent a billion petrodollars pushing at an open door.
Home and unhelmed, I drink to drop my heart from my mouth. Anyone who doubts that might is still right has only to negotiate British roads on a bicycle.
Planning ahead, the best we can do is to choose with care our future regrets.
We treat the natural world as a mine of commodities when it is something infinitely more valuable – our deepest well of metaphor.
We have no need to hypothesise parallel universes. The world contains seven billion minds – and that’s counting only the humans.
We long to capture a likeness; pin down an image; nail a phrase. It’s a wonder Nabokov is the only lepidopterist in literature.
“Fair-weather friend”; there’s a phrase that will make little sense to future generations.
We hate ourselves as if it were a virtue. I know people who treat their neighbour infinitely more kindly than they treat themselves.
In a sense, my rarely updated blog gives an accurate impression of my existence. Daily it publicises the failure of my good intentions.
We know from experience that we get from giving; yet we fear to call bullshit on capitalism’s reversal of the formula.
Is it simplicity when it’s freely chosen? Hauling logs from the wood, gathering coppice poles, the figure in my mind is not Gabriel Oak or Adam Bede but Marie Antoinette dressed as a milkmaid in the gardens of Versailles.
We prefer to suffer than to recover from those ills that define us.
Life is our only frame of reference. Death brings an end to everything, including itself.
The Lost Art of Losing Page 4