“This gnostic conception is incompatible with the much more widespread one fostered by those for whom praxis primarily means transforming the world into an internment camp, thereby carrying History to its triumph.” #wirn
“‘In the beginning was the Press and later came the World.’…The World, its substance, is, from an industrial standpoint, a by-product; from a neo-Platonic standpoint, it is an emanation of the press. Facts issue from opinions by superfetation.” #wirn
“The ‘unfathomable’ characters of Orson Welles tells us more about Stirner than whole bookshelves of studies on the Young Hegelians.” #wirn
“…the strolling of the schizophrenic, introduced by Georg Büchner in LENZ, doused with metropolitan poison by Baudelaire, unraveled with amiable despair in Robert Walser.” #wirn
“‘To do things without knowing what they are’: This is how Adorno at Darmstadt described ‘the form of every artistic utopia today’: translating in his pathos Samuel Beckett’s dry ‘dire cela, sans savoir quoi….’” #wirn
“…remaining anonymous, part of a corps, a wolf pack.” #wirn
“‘…no longer reads philosophical texts and is still silent in algorithms? Then perhaps it might once again be said: “I threw my life at all the winds in heaven, but I kept my thought. It is little—it is all, it is nothing—it is life itself.”’” #wirn
“But Busby Berkeley’s remark was true at Versailles long before Hollywood: ‘There is no comeback for a has-been.’” #wirn
“In 1908, during twelve weeks of visionary experience, the first post-historical city appeared to Alfred Kubin: its name was Pearl.” #wirn
“…On the day before the double suicide, they referred to themselves as ‘two happy balloonists,’ who, like Eduard and Ottilie…finally have broken free from the world’s sphere of affinity.” #wirn
“According to Michelet, the fiercest royalists were not perhaps the nobles, nor the priests, but the hairdressers.’ The slogan of the age—‘Return to nature’—had mortally wounded them. ‘Everything was moving toward a horrifying simplicity.’” #wirn
“Various indomitable old ladies had once again been looking down on [Napoleon]….To remain steadfast to that challenge, years of military campaigning had to follow; and around a century later, for Proust, years of reclusion in a cork-lined cell.” #wirn
“…Excessive ridicule—its relentless, daily production—can lead to the total neutralization of its destructive power.” #wirn
“In the face of mass graves, history returns to being natural history.” #wirn
“Cardinal Berstein interpolated with a recondite sneer, ‘The phenomenon of bi-location, as exemplified in the case of St. Philip Nero, is well-known. But this is not the case of a saint.’” #wirn #bi-location
“No one is so facile and energetic about believing evil as a Pessimist, that is to say a Socialist; and, when one traitor is detected, what could be more natural than for others to be suspected.” #wirn
“…The barb of the one emotion lacerated her. The barb of the other she would save to dilacerate Him.” #wirn
“The cardinalitial mask is as superior (in impenetrable pachydermatosity) to that of the proverbial public-schoolboy, as is the cuticle of a crocodile to that of pulex irritans.” #wirn
“Lust and asceticism can be closely related forms of destitution—consider Oscar Wilde, J.K. Huysmans’ antiheroes, Victor Hugo’s Claudio Frollo—and they are among the main ones in the many-sided person that was the creator of Hadrian, and of course in Hadrian himself.” #wirn
“Franklin Rosemont, the great American historian of the Blues, American Surrealism, and the labour movement—who deserves a whole book to himself—calls Schwob a ‘precursor to Surrealism.’” #wirn
“The rich collect, and the poor hoard. It sounds obvious, but you have to have things to hoard and somewhere to hoard them. In other words: in a certain grey light, hoarding may look like a sickness of advanced capitalism, a disfiguring skin complaint on the surface of plenty.” #wirn
“A fantasy of old-time Milwaukee, dairy-colored surfaces through the leisurely days imperceptibly continuing to darken behind a bituminous haze safe to breathe, never as bad as Chicago…” #wirn
“…bartenders reliable as the law of gravity, one of the more appreciated side effects of Prohibition being what a bartender *doesn’t* do, and with how much finesse, sometimes genius, he doesn’t do it.” #wirn
“Yet, though the National Socialist League never made it much above the level of a street-corner slanging match, it was a slanging match Joyce kick-started with his customary relish.” #wirn
“‘You may perish out of your senses, but not out of your memory or imagination.’” #wirn
“The heartlessness of most literary publishers (‘wretched hunger struck hyenas,’ Carlyle called them) was epitomized for Emerson by the sale in June 1842 of 750 copies of Alcott’s CONVERSATIONS ON THE GOSPELS to some trunk makers, at five cents a pound, for lining trunks.” #wirn
“He read…Forster’s LIFE OF OLIVER CROMWELL in Dionysus Lardner’s CABINET ENCYCLOPEDIA edition. Lardner’s volumes were small and handy…which were useful in several ways. A soldier at the siege of Lucknow found that one of the volumes could stop a musket ball after passing through 120 pages.” #wirn
“…’Potato Magnetism.’” #wirn
“Emerson always preferred a reader to an annotator and a writer to a reader.” #wirn
