Fontenay, E. Sans Offenser Le Genre Humain: Réflexions Sur La Cause Animale. Paris: Le Livre De Poche, 2013. Print.
Finished: 2014-12-14
All posts by haelox
Our national consciousness (even though there’s no such thing) seems fundamentally diseased. Those who talk most about values act like amoral, resentful sadists. Those who talk most about justice are distracted by playing Where’s Waldo, obsessed with pointing at the -ism or privilege in every picture.
I think it’s really sad that a lot of the people who trying to work hardest for justice are so scoldy. It turns off a lot of the people who would otherwise join the cause. Our jobs in this world are to understand and magnify each other’s best intentions until they become meaningful change, not to prosecute each other for intangible wrong thoughts.
I am a witch
I will cast a spell
I will leave you withered
Opinions
I’m so utterly, utterly exhausted from people’s opinions, even those that I “agree with.” Surely there are better ways for us to interact with each other over matters of belief, and surely there are better ways to link our thinking minds to the things in the world around us. But by “surely,” I mean I’m not so sure at all, while surer every day that we are poisoning ourselves with regurgitation and excrement, and that opinions are the toxic waste product of industrialized thinking, the runoff from the process that farms and harvests our attention.
Ghost self
Leopardi, 25
There are two kinds of incredulity, one that derives from science, and the other (far more common) from ignorance, and from not knowing how to see what is can be, from knowing only a few possibilities, etc., only a few truths and hence only a few probabilities, etc., from not knowing how far possibility extends. (612)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 24
There is no more effective means of gaining access to the origins of nations (together with the progress of the human mind and the history of the peoples, matters all faithfully represented in languages), their remotest epochs, their provenance, the spread of mankind, and its distribution throughout the world, in short, the history of the obscurest beginnings of society and its first steps, than through etymologies, which, by going back up from language to language until the first origins of a word, offer the clearest ideas we can hope to have regarding the term’s first relations, thoughts, notions, etc. (607)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 23
The analysis of things spells the death of their beauty or greatness and the death of poetry. So too with the analysis of ideas, resolving them into their parts and elements and presenting these parts or elements in isolation, bare, without any accompaniment of concomitant ideas. (589)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 22
Certain quite extraordinary intelligences that nature has from time to time produced as if by some miracle have been either entirely or very nearly useless, precisely on account of the excessive power of either their intellect or their imagination which ended up unable to issue in anything or produce any specific result. (562)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.