A garland of quotations LXVI
Culled from the finest strangers in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
Such an Evening never passed before—roaring, kissing, embracing, fighting, smashing bottles & glasses against the wall, singing—in short, such a scene of uproar I never witnessed before, no, not even at Cambridge.—I drank nothing.
•S.T. Coleridge, letter to Sara Coleridge, 1799.
To influence the lives of men, one must remain outside the circle of forces which affect them.
So says the Sage, the Man of Knowledge, the Sensei whom we all follow.
•Ashida Kim, Ninja Secrets of Invisibility (1983).
Finally I had had all I could take of homelessness and alienation. “With such difficulties,” I said to myself, “it would be better to go off on my own so long as I am alive, and with such deprivation and wretchedness it would be better for me to go off to wherever my feet will carry me, even to the ends of the earth.” I decided to go to Cathay on my own. From my childhood I had had a desire to go to Cathay, but because of having to rule and other obstacles, it had never been possible. Now there was nothing for me to rule.
•Babur, Baburnama (1530).
If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice.
•Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).
Statements that are firm, established, and acknowledged as reliable and veridical, address to these individuals but one utterance, “You are incapable of truth!” The pariah, the mystic, and the psychotic know this utterance in the suffering and torment of their bodies.
•Alphonso Lingis, The Community of those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994).
It is not surprising that Grendel, a solitary creature and a hater of men, should detest the sounds of communal joy which he hears coming from Heorot
•Michael D. Cherniss, Ingeld and Christ (1972).
Everyone’s quick to blame the alien.
•Aeschylus, The Supplicants (ca. 460 BC).
Water blindly obeys both riverbed and banks. Should a river burst its banks with enough momentum, water would disobey its initial masters to force the ground and fashion another bed and other banks. Water is the sheep-like masses: the people. Embankments are the elite; and the waterbed, the State. Revolutions change the structure of States and the elite—periods in which the people will believe themselves freed from all chains. But when the torrent of revolution ebbs, the masses will quickly see that while the elite may change and life may move forward, the people remain eternally enslaved, having changed only its harness.
•Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-Plastique (1948).
Thus there may be a great increase in selfishness, a great decline of interest in government and society as a whole, and a rise of the more childish forms of individualism and in the more antisocial forms of concern for self and perhaps immediate family. Thus, paradoxically, the technological, highly productive society, by demanding less of the individual, may decrease his economic frustrations but increase his aggressions against the society. Certainly here would be fertile soil for what has come to be known as alienation.
•Kahn & Weiner, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (1967).
To picture a truly alienated man, picture a Kafka to whom it had never occurred to write a word. The only literature of alienation is an alienated literature, that is, a bad art, which is no art at all. An Erle Stanley Gardner novel is a true exercise in alienation. A man who finishes his twentieth Perry Mason is that much nearer total despair than when he started.
•Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (1975).
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
•E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with being Born (1973).
References: Babur: trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor (Modern, 2002); Coleridge: Seamus Perry, ed. Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection (Oxford UP, 2003); Aeschylus: quoted in the Weekly World News (May 23, 2005); Chazal: trans. Irving Weiss (Wakefield, 2021); Cioran: trans. Richard Howard (Arcade, 2012); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.
