"A smiling irony is our fate"
Anyhow, I have a scrap book that I turn to now and again, where I might sketch, or write things down, or often cut and paste images, colours, newspaper clippings or maybe random asbtract things from magazines. Humorous, poignant, ridiculous, moving, beautifull, sad. Whatever it is that would compell me in that moment to want to save it in some way.
It's been a little neglected for a while now, for it inescapably has it's roots in naive, introspecive, yet good hearted teenage emo-ness, but it was sort of born of frustration as well, from me wanting to capture some of those more transiant experiences that can pass us by, whether it's turning a page on a striking photogaph, reading a profound article, feeling connected to something or someone new, an author, someone's life you've read about or witnessed from the distance of history... and not wanting to just turn the next page as if nothing has happened. Recording that somehow, those new memories, thoughts and images you breathe in modern daily life, that just get sucked up and blended into who you are, and trying to somehow not loose, all those little moments of experience that can trickle away as if they had never happened as you carry on with carryin' on.
And due to the nature of it, the mixing of my thoughts and ideas, those of others, or of just color and shape and memory, in the end, hopefully becoming something of worth in and of itself.
Anyway, these are several years old in some cases, so it's representive of what I was reading at the time and they're not my all time favourite quotes per se, but I have the book the thing sitting here next to me, so here's what I have written on the inside cover...
EDIT:
(complete with casual comments to compensate for teenage MAN, I NEED TO LAID - ness)"In as much as everyman takes the suffering that falls to his share as teh greatest."Herman Hesse - SteppenwolfEarly 20th century German intellectuals, they weren't all Nazi sympathziers?
Go figure.
" ... or to melt down the hours in pleasing thought."Hazlitt's Table Talk: Chapter: One Living to One's SelfCommon sense courtesy of the 19th century this time. Old Billy boy loved to tell a tale or two. And to be fair, he had a lot to say. A snob occasionaly, an unfair cynic quite possibly, but an original, compassionate, free thinking man of the world nonetheless. When travelling the globe on your wits and the romantic colonial pride in your swollen, puffed out chest, was the folly of indulgant, lion hearted Englishmen everywhere.
"The Governor:
1) Never make personal remarks.
2) Never tell a hostess you enjoyed yourself.
3) Don't force anything mechanical.
4) Never kick anything inanimate.
5) Don't fart around with the enivitable."Joseph Heller - Good As GoldI <3 Jospeh Heller
When in doubt, when thinking too much gives you nose bleeds and you start intellectualising the patterns of griddle moosh on your morning waffles, always revert to teh funny. It's often the only thing that makes sense anyway. During my teens, as far as books go, Heller and Adams were often the much needed gravitaional pull beneath my "why me?" wings.
(As for quotes by the way, if you can get your hands on it, it doesn't get much better than Adams' The Meaning Of Liff.)
Oh and considering Kirk's new motivation to be a free-wheeling child of the summer sunshine, number 5 made just made me smile all the more.
