 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
page 1
page2
page3
page4
page5
page6
page7
page8
page9
page10
page11
page12
page13
page14
page15
page16
page17
page18
page19
page20
page21
page22
page23
page24
page25
page26
page27
page28
page29
page30
page31
page32
page33
page34
page35
page36
page37
page38
page39
page40
page41
page42
page43
page44
page45
page46
page 47
page48
page49
page50
page51
page52
page53
page54
page55
page56
page57
page58
page 59
page59
page 60
page61
page62
page 63
page 64
page 65
page66
page67
page 68
page 69
page 70
Page 71
page 72
pare 73
page 74
page 75
page76
page 77
page 78
page 79
page 80
page 81
page 82
page 83
page 84
page 85
page 86
page 87
page 88
page 89
page 90
page 91
page92
page93
page 94
page 95
page 96
page 97
page98
|
|
| QUOTATIONS 2130-2145 |
| ||||||
| 2130. The other day I saw a movie about life of the Innuit of Canadian North a hundred years ago. Let's hope their conditions changed for the better now, but I was struck with how much determination, ingenuity and shear physical exertion, seemingly beyond human capacity to endure, was required from them just to survive in those days. And, come to think of it, how little in comparison it would have taken them to escape this forbidding land, this frozen infinity, to a place more suitable for human habitation. For only a fraction of what it has cost them to stay they could have left. And yet stay they did, for thousands of years. But before we marvel at their incredible immovability, their infuriating obstinacy, their lack of initiative in the face of overwhelming evidence that anything must be better than what they have now, perhaps looking at ourselves would make us somewhat humble and hesitant to judge them. For how many of us endured, persevered, stayed in places, works, relationships, etc., rather than move, change, break up, in a word, escape? Inertia and passivity, fear of change, of the new, "better the devil you know" philosophy make us all the prisoners of status quo, of continuity and stability, even when anything else looks like it would be an improvement on what is. 2131. Let's face it, there are only two true, real choices each one of us is given to make in life: to let the world change you, i.e. to let it rearrange your original innate personality, and make you adhere to the standard acceptable pattern of behaviour, emotional responses, way of thinking, content of your world view, etc. By acquiescing to this transformation one becomes a useful cog in the great mechanism of society which guaranties its preservation and continuity by turning billions of unique individuals into an army of indistinguishable ants, each powerless to affect anything on its own. The other choice is to try to change the world, by resisting the impersonal leveling, by struggling for preservation of one's individuality, by making a difference, by leaving a mark. In a word, by turning into a butterfly who caused (or at least tried to) a hurricane by flapping its wings. It is simple to make the first choice – "The road that leads to it is easy, and there are many who travel it." The second one is difficult – "The way that leads to it is hard, and there are few people who find it." Yet, the choices are unavoidable. By not deliberately selecting one, one automatically opts for another, and has nobody to blame but himself when realizing later in life that he took the wrong turn and doesn't have enough time to return to a crossroads and take the right one. 2132. Premature ejaculation and young males. It is not that I'm trying to usurp the Kinsey's crown, or covet the laurels of Masters and Johnson. I just think the time has come to talk about this one highly embarrassing and distressing thing – premature ejaculation – and show that it is not some humiliating medical disability but quite natural phenomenon, a product of reproductive strategy nature employs to assure successful procreation of human species. It is well known that young males when sexually aroused have almost instantaneous erection, which leads to such an urgent need of intercourse that it leaves practically no time for foreplay, and ejaculate soon (too soon for their female partners) after intercourse initiated. Now, the explanation of this pattern of male sexual behavior is rather simple (and has nothing to do with inexperience or insensitivity) once we accept as a fact of life that, biologically speaking, the true purpose of sexual intercourse between male and female is not the expression of love and romance, of caring and bonding, no matter how desirable and rewarding they may be, but to facilitate a "encounter" of an egg and a sperm to ensure successful fertilization of the first by the second, leading ultimately to creation of a new life. And that's how nature in her unfathomable wisdom set the things up to guarantee continuation of a species. In the state of nature, however, life of our ancestors from whom we inherited the basic patterns of our socio-biological behavior was, as we all know, nasty, brutal and short, with "short" being the determining factor – few young men survived beyond their twenties. And to survive in these conditions of constant and all-pervasive brutality, violence and danger one had to be always on alert, always ready for a fight or a flight on the instant. So, when it comes to sex, the young men were men in a hurry. Sex had to be furtive and quick before anything interfered. And there were plenty of interferences and many of them were lethal. Long courtship, extended foreplay were the luxuries they could ill afford. A man who had to take too much time for both, which is now considered to be the characteristic of a good lover, most of the time would get neither. As a result, a "good and slow lover" had significantly less opportunity than a "bad and quick" one to produce offsprings, which is the only thing that matters, as far as the nature is concerned. So, the evolution and the natural selection actually favored the men with quick erection, no foreplay, and almost instant ejaculation. And the young men of today are their decedents exhibiting the same sexual characteristics. The fact that it doesn't give their female partners enough time to achieve orgasm, as regrettable as it is, does not affect the biological purpose of sex – the production of the new generation. Whether a female has orgasm or not is essentially irrelevant as far as procreation is concerned – a woman can have ten, fifteen, twenty children without ever experiencing orgasm. No one is denying that mutual sexual satisfaction is desirable in itself, regardless of its procreative utility. After all, that's why people have sex in the first place. But men's ways are not nature's ways. Whereas for man pleasure is a goal, for nature is just the means, a bait to assure procreation. Nature is a well tuned mechanism of indefinite self-renewal, a mysterious perpetum mobile recreating life again and again, ad infinitum. As a man grow older his erections become less and less spontaneous and it takes him more and more time to ejaculate. As a result, both foreplay and intercourse become longer. This creates an illusion that the older men are more experienced lovers, when in truth, in the state of nature from which, in evolutionary terms, we emerged just yesterday it will only decrease his chance to produce offsprings. Nature doesn't need the progeny of the old – the younger the parents the healthier the children. And the healthier the children the more of them will survive to have their own children. And that's what nature wants. Men don't control nature, nature controls men. As for a woman, the older she gets, and the less she is able to conceive, the more acutely she is aware that time is running out. And the more eager she becomes to make up for the early years of orgasmic scarcity by the later years of plenty. 2133. Why is it that whenever a politician opens his mouth, nothing comes out of it but a bland gruel of cliches and platitudes. Mainly because 100% of his energy is spent not to offend or disturb, and 0% to inspire or provoke. Hearing the same things expressed in the same words has a hypnotic effect on public, keeping it in a permanent state of drowsiness. And that's the way politicians like it. Saying some thing unusual (dare we say, original)may awake "the sleeping beast," and there is no way to know what it can do when aroused from its slumber. Most probably nothing good, as far as the offending politician is concerned. There is also this distressing possibility that your average politician has nothing (parish the thought) inspiring or provoking to say, even if his life depended on it. Now, to be completely fair, your average Mr. Public is hardly Demosthenes himself. He speech is full of cliches and platitudes as well, which makes him quite tolerant, most of the times, of similar deficiencies in the people looking for his vote. Of course, by far the best practitioners of the art of cliches and platitudes are the gipsy fortune tellers. A fortune teller always says the same thing to hundreds of different people, but each one of her clients believes that she's talking about him. And what if it is actually true? What if everyone of us is but a bundle of the same cliches and platitudes? What if you and me is nothing but a walking breathing, cliche? Scary thought, eh? 2134. One of the important differences between being poor and being rich is that the poor are constantly forced by scarcity of their means to choose one instead of the other among the things they want. Every day the poor have to confront various, yet depressingly similar "either... or..." situations – either I buy shoes, or a dress, either I go to the movies, or will watch TV, etc., etc. And there are seemingly infinite numbers and instances of such etceteras a poor person has to go through throughout his or her life. As a result, one becomes flexible. One learns to compromise, to settle for the second, or third, or fourth... best. Or do without altogether. Their wealth frees the rich from such burdensome necessities. They can have all the things all the time, shoes and dresses, hundreds of both. Flexibility and compromise is below their dignity –either... or ... is for the losers. Doing without is out of question. The only choice they ever make is between simply expensive, overly expansive, and outrageously expensive. And most go for the last. After all, you can't take it with you. To summarize, for the rich life is a generous Santa Claus, for the poor – a stingy Scrooge. So, are the poor always worth off, and irredeemably so? Not exactly. There is a silver lining in a cloud. It must be. Otherwise, life wouldn't be worth living. Not surprisingly, put into an extreme situation when money has no value, and one has nothing else to rely on but one's wits, the poor, having graduated from the "school of the hard knocks," exhibit, on average, much greater capacity to survive than the rich. All those skills of compromise, flexibility, inventiveness, and above all doing without, one learns through perpetual depravation, come handy when "doing without" is the only thing available. And the "poor" rich are famously not good at it. 2135. Instead of favoring the development of arts in general, and the art of painting in particular, the fully egalitarian society with its concomitant equitable distribution of wealth is actually detrimental to it. A painter, like any other worker, derives his livelihood from selling the product of his labor. Yet, unlike loafs of bread, paintings cannot be mass-produced at a little cost. Each one is different and requires time for both initial conception and eventual execution. It could be several days, or several months, or even several years. Such substantial investment of a painter's time makes paintings rather expensive, and only person of substantial means can afford to buy them – it were always the rich who patronized the arts and the artists. The fully egalitarian society is clearly not going to have people like this. So, who is going to support an artist in this case? The Soviet Union, the first truly egalitarian state, solved this problem by organizing painters into the Union of Soviet Painters. The government paid each artist a modest stipend and commissioned the individual works to help an artist to supplement his income. The results were appalling. The output was bland, homogeneous, and as predictable as cars coming from the assembly line. And the artists, though no longer starving and dying young physically, were famishing and prematurely fading away esthetically. At the end, the faceless, indistinguishable and indifferent bureaucrats had proven to be a poor substitute for various individual collectors, each with his specific taste and demands. And if the greatest possible variety of arts is desirable (and nobody would dare to argue with this), it can only be guarantied by the greatest possible number of the various customers who can afford to pay for it. 2136. Saw the pictures of Mars on TV. Looks exactly like Arizona. Makes the whole enterprise of interplanetary travel rather pointless. Unless next time they show us some green men on spindly legs walking backward. This certainly should arouse interest. We don't have many like them over here. 2137. The wonted superiority of German high culture is nothing but a nationalistic myth (the habitual invocations of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant notwithstanding), and as such has to be debunked instead of being encouraged by a centuries-old cliche, which by incessant repetition assumed the status of self-evident truth. There is nothing unique, exclusive or superior about German high culture. It is an integral part of the pan-European 18-19th century post- Enlightenment Culture. Goethe, Beethoven and Kant had their no less illustrious counterparts in England, France, Italy, and other European countries. And all of them would be unthinkable without Italian Renaissance. And regardless of their official citizenship or permanent residency, each one of them was a product of European cross-cultural pollination, dialogue, following, borrowing, and imitation, which gave birth to a kind of intellectual, artistic, and cultural unity the modern European Union can only dream about. None of these great German geniuses could have appeared or existed in isolation. Kant famously acknowledged his debt to Hume for awakening him from his dogmatic slumbers. He also said that he had to read Rousseau's books several times. Beethoven is unthinkable without Mozart, and Mozart without Italian composers. As for Goethe, no poet is an island – a writer, even a great one, is but a dot in the unbreakable curve of Literature, inseparable neither from what preceded nor what succeed him. Sure, there is no another Beethoven. But there is no another Verdi or Tchaikovsky either. No country has a monopoly on genius, no nation cornered the market on creativity. Which brings us face to face with this highly problematic phenomenon of "national pride." How justifiable is a collective partaking by the millions of creatively sterile mediocrities in glory of a few geniuses, only because they happen to speak the same language and were born in the same geographical location? How justifiable is cultural nationalism? Isn't it a high time to find a cure for this pernicious delusion? We may all benefit from it, and the Germans seem to be still in great need of such bitter but necessary medicine. Sons do not share the blame For crimes of their fathers, But neither can they put the claim To glorious deeds of others. Collective guilt, collective pride Are both equally unfair, Hence must be equally decried And I am nobody's heir. or And I am everybody'd heir Which is esentially the same thing. 2138. As the world, after a short respite following the Holocaust, is reverting back more and more to its traditional antisemitism, using this time the existence and politics of Israel as a new pretext, it, paradoxically, provides stronger and stronger justification for the very existence of Israel as the only refuge from this old pernicious bigotry. 2139. Though a minority in general population, the singles and the childless are by far the most generous with their money and time supporting various charitable causes. Like all of us they're programmed by nature to take care of children and relatives. And having none of their own they transfer these instincts on the needy, by "adopting" them as such, and in the process satisfying their parental and familial needs as well. 2140. Ever wonder why so many Jews of Eastern European descent, claim to have at least one rabbi among their forefathers? Here is an answer. Confined, till 1917, by the Russian Tzarist regime to the Pale of Settlement many Jewish men couldn't find any job there and were compelled to devote, by virtue of necessity, their entire lives to Talmudic studies, while their wives "minded the store" or some other tiny businesses for a family to survive. And though it is quite plausible that in the process most of those men had become learned and respected scholars, it is impossible to say now with certainty how many of them were actually officiated as rabbis. Understandably, their descendants are not particularly eager to undertake any scrupulous investigation into such an obscure and remote past, for delving too deeply into its murky waters threatens to undermine their pride in having such illustrious ancestors. Thus, they are more than happy to keep family legend alive and to bequest it untarnished to the next generation. For such is the stuff all legends are made of. 2141. A prayer is a hope expressed in idiom of religion. 2142. If globalization, in non-economical, human terms, means that we are all to become the citizens of the Globe while each one of us remains a citizen of a particular nation, than the Jews must be uniquely qualified for such a double role: for 2000 years, while living everywhere in the world, they managed to maintain spiritual and cultural allegiance to Jewry –a nation, albeit one without "a permanent address," which in a way made them even more "global" than the present definition requires. Of course, some may say that Globalization is a typical "Jewish plot," a wish to universalize, and thus normalize, a peculiarly Jewish predicament of homelessness. 2143. Divided we fall, united we stand – one cannot win alone. For to win strength is needed, and strength comes from numbers. And so does courage. For courage, whether physical or moral, is seldom individual, it normally comes from being a part of a group as well. And the greater the numbers, the greater a hope of winning. And the greater a hope of winning the greater is courage. For if not a certainty than at least a hope of "winning" is essential to maintain one's courage – where there is no even a hope courage becomes suicidal, and very few of us are willing, consciously, to commit suicide. 2144. One can learn to live with "too little, too late." Not happily ever after, of course, no more illusion on this score. From that moment, it takes an extra effort, but one can still move on. Every bit of food leaves disagreeable aftertaste in mouth, but one keeps eating. There is a whiff of unpleasant odor in every breath taken, but one keeps breathing. But what if it is not "too little?" What if it is actually more, much more than that, and yet still "too late?" This, as I have discovered, is much tougher to take. The clearer my thinking is, the more innovative my ideas are, the better my writing becomes, the more miserable I am. The growing realization that it's all in vain, the unavoidable awareness that it's all too late is getting increasingly harder to bear. How to go on knowing with merciless certainty what a colossal irretrievable waste your life has been? That is the question I have to find some answer, some resemblance of answer every day. Like Antonio Gramsci, for a long time "I have been a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist of will." But will is not inexhaustible, and time is running out. Perhaps, it's run out already. 2145. As I pass by the same shop windows day after day, month after month, a feeling of resentment towards the gorgeous mannequins standing there grows in me. There is this infuriating things about them – they never gain any weight nor grow older. Why couldn't we all be like that? |
 Sign Guestbook |
 View Guestbook |
|
. |
| Visitors: 00025 |