Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we known we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.
— American Pastoral, Philip Roth

The longer quote is below the fold.
Continue reading “Other people…”

At the same time members of the Committee on the District of Columbia are considering a bill to build another bridge over the Potomac. There is always a bill to build another bridge over the Potomac, and the number of times these ephemeral spans have been launched across drawing boards and paraded before Congress and displayed to usually irate and always loudly outspoken citizen’s organizations is almost beyond calculation. But the District Committee, charged under the Constitution with the management of the affairs of the voteless Federal City, patiently goes through the motions whenever required. This morning, with Magnus Hollingsworth of Wisconsin in the chair in his usual small, shrewed, purse-lipped fashion, it is giving the matter its usual intensive consideration. Just to show how seriously thy take their duties and how important it all really is,such freshman as bluffly vapid George Carroll Townsend of Maryland and worried Henry Lytle of Missouri are being as solemn as all get out about it, but Magnus Hollingsworth, as befits a veteran on the committee, is surreptitiously reading the funnies under the table edge and isn’t paying attention at all. He knows that bridge isn’t going to be built.
— Advice and Consent, Allen Drury

At the sight of the still intact city, he remembered his great international precursors and set the whole place on fire with his artillery in order that those who came after him might work off their excess energies in rebuilding.
— The tin drum, Gunter Grass

A GREEN HUNTING CAP squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.
— A confederacy of dunces, by John Kennedy Toole.

Associations of mutual interest between the university and the corporations were natural, inevitable, and widely accepted. According to the state legislature, they were to be actively pursued. The legislature, in fact, was already counting the “resources” that could be “allocated” elsewhere in state government when corporations began picking up more of the tab for higher education, so success in finding this money would certainly convince them that further experiments in driving the university into the arms of the private sector would be warranted, that actually paying for the university out of state funds was irresponsible, or even immoral, or even criminal (robbing widows and children, etc., to fatten sleek professors who couldn’t find real employment, etc.).
– Moo, Jane Smiley

Gradually, but not as gradually as it seemed to some parts of his brain, he began to infuse his tones with a sarcastic wounding bitterness. Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish. Within quite a short time he was contriving to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet written by a pacifist, Jewish, literate Communist. A growing mutter, half-amused, half-indignant, arose about him, but he closed his ears to it and read on. Almost unconsciously he began to adopt an unnameable foreign accent and to read faster and faster, his head spinning. As if in a dream he heard Welch stirring, then whispering, then talking at his side. he began punctuating his discourse with smothered snorts of derision. He read on, spitting out the syllables like curses, leaving mispronunciations, omissions, spoonerisms uncorrected, turning over the pages of his script like a score-reader following a presto movement, raising his voice higher and higher. At last he found his final paragraph confronting him, stopped, and looked at his audience.

— Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Lady on a bike.

…like ourselves, the rebels had become experts in repairing such damage. Sherman, in his memoirs, relates an anecdote of his campaign to Atlanta that well illustrates this point. The rebel cavalry lurking in his rear to burn bridges and obstruct his communications had become so disgusted at hearing trains go whistling by within a few hours after a bridge had been burned, that they proposed to try blowing up some of the tunnels. One of them said, “No use, boys, Old Sherman carries duplicate tunnels with him, and will replace them as fast as you can blow them up; better save your powder.”

– Personal memoirs of U.S. Grant.

Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.
–Herman Hesse, Beneath the wheel.

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

– Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams.