Once you have found the door, it is always with you. You simply look for it and there it is. Finding it the first time is where the difficulty lies. Following the insights that Addedomarus had given me, what I eventually concluded was that it was necessary to cleanse one’s vision in order to see the door. To do this one must return to the place, the geographical location where one last believed the world to be fluid, responsive to oneself. In short one must return to the last place in which one had stood before the iron hand of modern rationality gripped one’s mind.
Clipping
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books > Piranesi (Clarke, Susanna)
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
For a moment, the leap looked soothing. I could jump after the iron shoe and my aches would split apart like the shoe. No more thoughts of Lenka, no more knee pain, but the body must not be violated. The body was the most important thing, carrying within it the code to the universe, a part of a larger secret that was significant even if it was never to be revealed.
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
Valerie was an unknowing force. Leaving her chocolates seemed banal and almost insulting, but she didn’t need to be the victim of my glorification of her, idolatry in itself a certain kind of death.
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
“My father never did anything else after that,” Valerie said. “Mostly, he became a drunk. But a man only needs one thing to be proud of. It will carry him through the rest of his life.”
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
We believe that we can fix our marriage. We know that the world operates on a whim, a system of coincidences. There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war.
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, “How unlikely! Yet here we are,” and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
“I went to the spring celebration a few years back,” Dr. Bivoj says. “I could see the stars, dew on the grass, and I felt an irresistible urge to remove my shoes. A woman I didn’t know kissed me on the cheek. I’m telling you this because I imagine that by knowing these people, I also knew your grandfather. People who have a different idea of ambition. Of building houses with their own hands and living off simpler things. They made me realize that the way I viewed ambition had been a cancer, killing me since the day I was born. Do you want your name to be known, Jakub? I used to. I wanted people to pronounce it in classrooms after my death. I’ve made myself unhappy most of my life so a professor could write my name on the blackboard and punish students for not memorizing it. Isn’t that something?”
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books > Spaceman of Bohemia (Kalfar, Jaroslav)
The universe assigned the tasks of speaking and kissing to the lips because there is never a need to do both at the same time.
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web > Science and art are different kinds of truth
[https://flashbak.com/raymond-chandlers-guide-to-street-hoodlum-and-prison-lingo-443428/]
There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first truth is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would be a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from being ridiculous.
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books > Nobody's Son (Stewart, Sean)
Faith is a candle where Reason is the sun, No one needs a candle: until darkness falls.