Pith and Wit
Archive for the ‘insight’ Category.
Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.
People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?
Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics. Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?” On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth. Aha, I thought. A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade. (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend. I bleed red. I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)
Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance? People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.
We may confidently assume that those who lack curiosity are also “non-judgmental”. People who fear being wrongly definite repress all their instincts.
The surest indication that you need to pause and ponder right now is the feeling that you ought to wait until you’re better able to think.
People who lack intelligence but consider themselves to be “players” self-identify by flagrantly accentuating their sexual characteristics, as though a fabulous distinction accrued to them by virtue of possessing the primary appendages of the species.
What we need to remember about criminals is that they spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about whether their mothers ever loved them.
We were creatures of stimulus-and-response when trilobites were still a hundred million years in the future.
We don’t “make” decisions. Decisions make themselves. Sooner or later we catch up to them.
People’s insistence on being respected appears to be proportional to their inability to earn respect.
Lethargy indicates repression.
An expert is a person who believes there is no middle ground between expertise and ignorance.
When the ladies of Wall Street torched their brassieres in the late 1960s, inaugurating the age of feminism, the preponderance of men were not the chauvinistic beasts the women’s spokespeople labeled them as being. However, when the feminists objected to being treated “demeaningly” by fellows who stood up when they entered the room and made a habit of opening doors for them, then announced not only did they have the right to be promiscuous “just like you,” but had taken to regarding men strictly as sex objects, guys began to think, “You know what? This suits the hell out of me.” In the space of five or six years the feminists reversed fully three million years of the evolutionary trend affiliating men to women as post-mating husbands and fathers, a behavior not originally inherent in the anthropoid male. Consequently, most men today, if they had their druthers, would fuck at least one fresh woman every day of the week, no strings attached; and if the women didn’t like it, they could kiss the men’s asses as they left the bedroom. Did I hear somebody say Mondo Cane?
Our most piquant memories are of earlier versions of ourselves and of our loved ones we don’t stand the ghost of a chance of retrieving. Our second most piquant are of splendid interludes of sun-splashed vibrancy and pregnant stillness—dreams of sweet promise— that we subsequently desecrated by the way we chose to live.
Salesmanship consists of convincing a person that he needs to buy something. Good salesmanship consists of ensuring that the need is a legitimate one. Selling is just a technique. Whether its use is good or bad depends on the character of the salesman.
Ideology differs from philosophy in that its terms are closed. They contain no growth matter and cannot be extrapolated in any sense other than mechanically. They are precepts and simple assertions rather than active principles.
A mind-set manifests itself in different ways in different circumstances. Psychologically, there is no difference between the 1920s small-town reverend and the head of a contemporary women’s studies department. They are both authoritarian Puritan fanatics.
Can it be surprising that a people who allow appearances to govern their opinions and existence should always be addressing the symptom rather than the disease?
The prevalence of unachievable ambitions and unrealistic expectations—we encounter them every day—is an indication that the real-world intelligence of the population has recently been plummeting like a barometer before the onset of a hurricane.