We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the ...absurd.... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've been aboard this destroyer for two weeks now, and we've already been through four air attacks. I'm in the war at last, Doc. I... caught up with that task force that passed me by. I'm glad to be here. I had to be here, I guess. But I'm thinking now of you, Doc, and you, Frank, and Dolan, and Dawdy, and Insignia, and everyone else on that bucket. All the guys everywhere who sailed from tedium to apathy and back again with an occasional sidetrip to monotony. This is a tough crew on here and they have a wonderful battle record. But I've discovered, Doc, that the unseen enemy of this war is the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a terrible sort of suicide. And I know now that the ones who refuse to surrender to it are the strongest of all. Right now, I'm looking at something that's hanging over my desk, a preposterous hunk of brass attached to the most bilious piece of ribbon I've ever seen. I'd rather have it than the Congressional Medal of Honor. It tells me what I'll always be proudest of, that at a time in the world when courage counted most, I lived among sixty-two brave men. So Doc, and especially you, Frank, don't let those guys down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freud makes much of the distinction between jokes which just barely make sense, and those whose main value lies in the sense they ...make. He calls the first kind "jests," and thinks them radically distinct from wit. In jests our motive is the mere pleasure that children have in talking nonsense, a pleasure that he thinks is not of itself comic. The fact that our nonsense does just barely, in another sense, make sense, serves only to appease our critical judgment and release us from our adult task of inhibiting these childish proclivities. The energy which we had been employing in this task, however, being thus liberated, not only greatly increases our pleasure in the nonsense, but, in some manner which Freud does not even try to explain, makes it a comic pleasure. When, however, besides barely making sense, a piece of nonsense actually "says a mouthful" on some subject of current interest, or taps our deeper reservoirs of sexual and aggressive passion, then the pleasure is still greater--and still more comic, I suppose--and the jest is properly called wit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, ...in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past,... Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with ...a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belon...gs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are ... intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and wh...ich are excluded for lack of interpreters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when t...he Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »