[3.14.1916] I’m writing to you today out of sentimental necessity — I have an anguished, painful need to speak to you. It’s easy to see that I have nothing to tell you. Just this: that I find myself today at the bottom of a bottomless depression. The absurdity of the sentence speaks for me. I’m [...]
Archive for the ‘Short Prose’ Category
Letter to Mário de Sá-Carneiro :: Fernando Pessoa
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Quote on July 17, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Nietzsche’s Jesus
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Anti-Christ, Christianity, Gospels, Jesus Christ, Nietzsche, Philosophy on July 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“. . . . he had denied any chasm between God and man, he lived this unity of God and man as his ‘glad tidings’ . . . .” “One sees what came to an end with the death on the Cross: a new, an absolutely primary beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an [...]
The Pleasures of Rereading :: David Gates
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Article, Newsweek on July 6, 2009 | 2 Comments »
NEWSWEEK Published Jun 27, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Jul 13, 2009 Above the table on which I’m now writing hangs an old framed print showing Mr. Pickwick’s street-smart servant, Sam Weller, prophetically pointing out to his chubby little master—in tights, gaiters, and spectacles—a vast, teeming mob of tiny figures: the characters Charles Dickens was [...]
Rapture of the Nerds
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Article, Artificial Intelligence, New York Times on May 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Coming Superbrain By JOHN MARKOFF Published: May 23, 2009 The New York Times Mountain View, Calif. — It’s summertime and the Terminator is back. A sci-fi movie thrill ride, “Terminator Salvation” comes complete with a malevolent artificial intelligence dubbed Skynet, a military R.&D. project that gained self-awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant [...]
O my brothers, break, break the old tablets!
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Nietzsche, Philosophy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra on April 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in a “twilight,” though this lie is told. Instead: one day they laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods [...]
A Clockwork Orange Resucked
Posted in Short Prose, tagged A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, What does clockwork orange mean? on April 20, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Introduction I first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962, which ought to be far enough in the past for it to be erased from the world’s literary memory. It refuses to be erased, however, and for this the film version of the book made by Stanley Kubrick may be held chiefly responsible. I [...]
Suicide: the one truly serious philosophical problem — Camus
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Camus, Philosophy, Suicide on April 20, 2009 | 7 Comments »
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible. – Pindar, Pythian iii An Absurd Reasoning Absurdity and Suicide There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. [...]
For all things have been baptized in the well of eternity and are beyond good and evil
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Nietzsche, Philosophy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra on April 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
BEFORE SUNRISE The world is deep – and deeper than day had ever been aware. Not everything may be put into words in the presence of day. But the day is coming, so let us part. O heaven above me, pure and deep! You abyss of light! Seeing you, I tremble with godlike desires. To [...]
Naked Lunch On Trial
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Naked Lunch, Obscenity, William S. Burroughs on March 23, 2009 | 3 Comments »
The method must be purest meat and no symbolic dressing, actual visions and actual prisons as seen then and now. Prisons and visions presented with rare descriptions corresponding exactly to those of Alcatraz and Rose. A naked lunch is natural to us, we eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don’t hide the [...]
On Natural Death :: Lewis Thomas
Posted in Short Prose, tagged death on March 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
There are so many new books about dying that there are now special shelves set aside for them in bookshops, along with the health-diet and home-repair paperbacks and the sex manuals. Some of them are so packed with detailed information and step-by-step instructions for performing the function that you’d think this was a new sort [...]
The Madman :: Friedrich Nietzsche
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Aphorism, Nietzsche, Philosophy, The Gay Science on March 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The madman.- Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” -As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? [...]
Birth of Tragedy: Sections 9 – 15 :: Nietzsche
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Apollo, Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus, Nietzsche, Philolology, Philosophy on January 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
**** Kaufmann, following the precedent of Crane Brinton’s Nietzsche (1965), George A. Morgan, Jr.’s What Nietzsche Means (1941) and the English version of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926-28), translates “Apollinisch” as “Apollinian”—rather than “Apollonian.” Accordingly, here, Golffing’s “Apollonian” has been changed to “Apollinian.” **** 9 Everything that rises to the surface in [...]
Birth of Tragedy: Sections 1 – 8 :: Nietzsche
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Apollo, Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus, Nietzsche, Philolology, Philosophy on January 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Birth of Tragedy **** Kaufmann, following the precedent of Crane Brinton’s Nietzsche (1965), George A. Morgan, Jr.’s What Nietzsche Means (1941) and the English version of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926-28), translates “Apollinisch” as “Apollinian”—rather than “Apollonian.” Accordingly, here, Golffing’s “Apollonian” has been changed to “Apollinian.” **** 1 Much will have [...]
Dreamtigers Epiloge :: J. L. Borges
Posted in Dreamtigers, Jorge Luis Borges, Short Prose, tagged Borges, Dreamtigers, Jorge Luis Borges, Poetry on December 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
God grant that the essential monotony of this miscellany (which time has compiled – not I -and which admits past pieces that I have not dared to revise, because I wrote them with a different concept of literature) be less evident than the geographical and historical diversity of its themes. Of all the books I [...]
Giacomo Joyce :: James Joyce
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Giacomo Joyce, James Joyce, Joyce, Reflections on December 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
[Numbers in brackets indicate the ends of the pages of Joyce's original manuscript notebook.] * Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing- glasses. Yes: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids. Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet [...]
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