Sunday 31 January 2010

January 31

The spirit moves with action yet action moves from the spirit. Our task is to start.

*

One day, the messengers of the world will rise up and shoot first.

*

With luck, we may be inoculated by experience. The only immunity against stupidity is to have contracted it at least once.

*

Reform demands feeling but sentimentality is reactionary. Dickens’s first readers could congratulate themselves on their tender feelings for Smike even as they stepped over the child prostitute in their doorway.

*

A better word for triumph is reprieve.

Saturday 30 January 2010

January 30

The most shameful iconoclasm is the kind that’s well remunerated.

*

‘Fearless’ is an epithet which bigots apply to themselves. An open mind grapples constantly with dread.

*

Curious, how many now living were Cleopatra in a former life and how few the slave who emptied her chamber-pot.

*

The voyage of self-discovery is not without risk. What if you reach your destination and can’t stand the place?

*

Distrust the man who does not apologise to the snail he’s just trodden on.

Monday 25 January 2010

January 25

Life is made of unfinishings. Temperament concludes from this either hope or despair.

*

I thought I was being flippant but I found it online. The only thing missing from God the Action Figure is the prefix ‘In–’.

*

Innately subversive, laughter can be turned, like a spy, against the common good. We hear this in the self-congratulation of the snigger.

*

Some journalists fabricate, but most insist on paraphrasing the press release that does it for them.

Friday 22 January 2010

January 22

The tragedy of sleep is that we can’t be awake to appreciate it.

*

Given the propensity of families to quarrel, an appeal to universal brotherhood is tantamount to an invocation of war.

*

Thought and reason are not always aligned. One must think oneself stupid in order to avoid thinking oneself stupid.

*

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof someone will make a wisecrack.

Tuesday 19 January 2010

January 19

The libertarian response to our present crisis is to assert its non-existence. They shake their heads until their eyes blur and proclaim this clarity of vision.

*

We are all bigots when our sense of self depends upon it.

*

It is no more abject to read a book because everyone else has than to avoid it for the same reason.

*

The recurrent nightmare of a Papuan warrior finds him deep in enemy territory when his comrades suddenly vanish. The techno-grunt jangling with gadgets and acronyms suffers exactly the same dream. We are no different from our ancestors –– only more encumbered.

*

Doubtless the play in which I must perform tonight, without having learned a single line, would in the dream of an earlier incarnation have been the rowan twig with which I confronted a sabre-toothed tiger.

Saturday 16 January 2010

January 16

Why isn’t bullshit listed on the Stock Exchange?

*

Truth runs uphill. The blowhards on Fox News always start with that advantage.

*

If we listed Churchill’s failings in the absence of his achievements, we would remember a monster.

*

He who desires, but acts not, has a shot at a halfway decent marriage.

Friday 15 January 2010

January 15

Eight times in a million years, human beings colonized Britain. Seven times these attempts failed; why should it be any different for us?

*

The Earth abides, and bides its time. I like to imagine yet that our voices will be missed.

*

Perhaps science fiction remains niche because of its emphasis on deep time, deep space – the dizzying perspectives of the Universe. Fiction that puts us into context is safest confined to the nerd ghetto.

*

And yet we are tellurian. Every trip into the stars turns our faces towards home.

Thursday 14 January 2010

January 14

For Proust, it was a madeleine. Yesterday, the smell of a particular blend of mud restored me to my childhood.

*

I still look under my pillow for the spider that died there in 1983.

*

Truth is complex, lies are easy. Fiction solves this problem by wearing its untruth on its sleeve –– thereby asserting kinship with its supposed opposite.

*

Nothing kills reading more effectively than its elevation to a virtue.

Wednesday 13 January 2010

January 13

Even paradox feels glib when it makes an exhibition of itself.

*

Should Paradise exist, our instincts would have to be filtered out of us by death, or else we’d ruin the place.

*

Distinct from other ages, when exile still meant a place of brightness somewhere, there’ll be no green shade to retire to when the world turns to shit.

*

Imbeciles who call global warming science a ‘belief’ are on to something yet. Environmentalism shares with God-hankering an inexpressible nostalgia.

*

Our gaze is the tribute that beauty demands of us. The bloody tyrant.

*

The truth may set you free but it’s cold outside.

Tuesday 12 January 2010

January 12

Concerned for the environment, she insists on taking reusable bags whenever she flies to New York to do her shopping.

*

The instant S. dropped the first lobster in the pot, I knew that, except for those who love me, my own death will be of no more consequence.

*

The dominant mode of the aphorism appears to be sourness: evidence of its inadequacy as a form –– if we seek in literature the sum of human experience.

*
Admiring new hedgerows, young woods – the slow restoration of ‘improved’ farmland – I wonder if progress and vandalism are distinguishable only with hindsight.

*

Our nostalgia for the country condemns us all to the suburbs.

*

My contract with the landscapes I so value must be never to live there.