Martin Buber believed that the foundation for human existence is relational. People can create between-zones of resonant meaning. In a letter to Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist, he wrote, “Dialog in my sense implies the necessity of the unforeseen, and its basic element is surprise, the surprising mutuality.” Isn’t this what happens when I hear the words spoken to me in the room as alive, not dead. Isn’t it always a surprise?
This is the zone of transference and countertransference. The between must be felt. The words arrive as an embodied surprise.
—Siri Hustvedt Inside the Room
This story is a sort of leading indicator of a breakdown in morale and group cohesion generally as so much work is done from home. That is probably bad for a lot of projects; it’s just that one of the projects it’s bad for is fraud. —Matt Levine, Fraud is no fun without friends
it was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities. There is an obvious parallel here with archaeology. The broken pots of antiquity, from which the past can sometimes, but always provisionally, be reconstructed, are exciting to discover, even if they are pieces of the most quotidian objects. —Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
Работавший в министерстве иностранных дел Асадолла-мирза, призывая собеседников не спешить с выводами или обратить на что-то особое внимание, всегда восклицал: «Моменто, моменто!» Позже я узнал, что в переводе на нормальный язык, это означало: «Минуточку, минуточку!» — Ирадж Пезешкзод, Дядюшка Наполеон (tr. Kondyreva/Mikhalyov)
– Дорогой мой, вы стали жертвой покушения. Замышлялось членовредительство… Обвиняемая была намерена отрезать вам… э – э… фрагмент вашего уважаемого организма, а вы не можете даже назвать час этого прискорбного события!
Дустали-хан, окончательно выйдя из себя, взорвался:
– Знаете что, ага! Я на этом, как вы говорите, «фрагменте» часы не ношу!
—ibid.
I once worked in an office building in which some troubled anonymous soul took to destroying the lavatories. It seemed like motiveless, insane destruction, until one day, on a wall next to a wrecked water-closet, we read the scribbled words: if the cistern cannot be changed, it must be destroyed —Salman Rushdie, The Location of Brazil
Dans un contexte terroriste, il faut considerer une femme comme individu. —Jacquard to Merlaux in “Au Service de la France”
What is not poetry cannot be a translation of poetry —Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Один пижон
Имел ПИ жен
—Ефим Мандель
В такую погоду, не только водку, и термометр проглотишь, лишь бы градусы были —Нодар Думбадзе, Я, Бабушка, Илико и Илларион
The man in Princeton asks his way to Columbia. “If I were you,” he is unhelpfully told, “I wouldn’t start from Princeton.” —Denys Turner, All Will Be Well
Charlie: You’re a Fourierist?!
Tom: Yes.
Charlie: Fourierism was tried in the 19ths century and failed. Wasn’t Brook Farm Fourierist? It failed.
Tom: That’s debatable.
Charlie: That Brook Farm failed?
Tom: That it ceased to exist, I’ll grant you. Whether it was really a failure, I don’t think can be definitively said.
Charlie: For me, ceasing to exist is failure. That’s pretty definitive.
Tom: Everyone ceases to exist. That doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure. —Metropolitan
Первая песня я думаю она была более похожа на “дыр бул щил” чем на “румяной зарею покрылся восток” это точно, потому что авангард был явно раньше чем классика —Юрий Олеша, Книга прощания
Я как-то предложил Маяковскому купить у меня рифму.
— Пожалуйста, — сказал он с серьезной деловитостью. — Какую?
— Медикамент и медяками.
— Рубль.
— Почему же так мало? — удивился я.
— Потому что говорится “медикамент”, с ударением на последнем слоге.
— Тогда зачем вы вообще покупаете?
— На всякий случай.
— ibid.
“I’ve come to the view that we shouldn’t trust scientists more or less than we trust other people,” Lipsitch said at the event. “We should trust science. And when scientists speak science, we should trust them, because we should recognize that they are speaking in a way that is based on evidence. When scientists express political views or policy preferences or even claims about how the world is that are not citing evidence, we should not give those scientists undue deference.” —Mara Hvistendahl quoting Marc Lipsitch
When we say a crime was premeditated, for example, that doesn’t mean that the perp chanted a mantra or practiced mindfulness meditation before doing it —John Michael Greer on meditation
Sir Arthur Harris was notorious for driving his Bentley at high speed through the streets from his headquarters in High Wycombe to the Air Ministry. Upon pulling him over late one night, a policeman purportedly admonished Harris with “you might have killed somebody, sir.” “Young man,” he snapped, “I kill thousands of people every night!” —tumblr user @youzicha quoting Lt. Col. Jeffrey Schnakenberg’s thesis
Память человеческая — как газ, заполняет все доступное ей пространство. —Мария Клейнер, Между небом
“What I want to avoid is to think from our parochial 2015 view—from my own limited life experience, my own limited brain—and super-confidentially postulate what is the best form for civilization a billion years from now, when you could have brains the size of planets and billion-year life spans. It seems unlikely that we will figure out some detailed blueprint for utopia. What if the great apes had asked whether they should evolve into Homo sapiens—pros and cons—and they had listed, on the pro side, ‘Oh, we could have a lot of bananas if we became human’? Well, we can have unlimited bananas now, but there is more to the human condition than that.” —Raffi Khatchadourian quoting Nick Bostrom
Rated Zed 