But the deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naïve. How do we know how we feel? I’m likely much closer to Žižek’s aforementioned description of Titanic: There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.
—Chuck Klosterman
—found in Eating the Dinosaur (2009
WORK
Concise, compelling works and excerpts from antiquity until today. A commonplace book of sorts.
Eugene Bullard’s Motto
“All Blood Runs Red”
—the motto on Eugene Bullard’s plane. Bullard was the first African-American pilot to fly in combat, and the only African-American pilot in World War I. Bullard flew for France, but never for the United States; he tried to sign with the US Army Air Service, but they were only selecting white pilots. ※ Watch the 3-part documentary ► All Blood Runs Red: The Incredible True Story of Eugene Jacques Bullard.
from “The Devil & The Good Lord” (Jean Paul Sartre)
GOETZ: Someone was to have come in the autumn.
HILDA: Who?
GOETZ: I don’t know any more. [Pause] Tell me. What is today? What day of what month?
HILDA: Do you think I count the days? We have only one now, that begins and begins again; it is given to us with the dawn and taken away with the night. You are a clock that has stopped and always tells the same time.
—Jean Paul Sartre
—from “The Devil & The Good Lord” (translated by Kitty Black)
—found in The Devil & The Good Lord and Two Other Plays (1960
Toni Morrison
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
—Toni Morrison
—found in her 1993 Nobel Lecture
Allowables (Nikki Giovanni)
Allowables
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened
—Nikki Giovanni
—found in Chasing Utopia (2013)
from Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…
—Walt Whitman
—found in the Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)
from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise——“
“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.
“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily. “Really you are very dull!”
—Lewis Carroll
—found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
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