Many people are well-meaning, good-intentioned, doing-the-best-they-can, jerks.
"If you can't learn to do something well,
learn to enjoy doing it poorly."
If you get married nowadays, chances are, more likely than not, you'll end up divorced.
We are destined to spend our entire lives under a variety of compulsions: we must eat, sleep, drink, eliminate wastes properly, find an appropriate mate . . . if we fail to respond to these compulsions properly, we are rewarded with more pain.
Even, in its own ways, for the rich, the powerful, the talented, the beautiful . . . . life is still difficult.
All happy feelings, fade away. So do the unhappy ones.
As the saying goes, "the one thing we should learn from experience is that we do not learn from experience." Thus far, it does not seem to be the case the wisdom is cumulative; each generation, in general, makes about the same mistakes as the generations before it.
"Perhaps the only true dignity of man
is his capacity to despise himself."
- George Santayana
Lots of people are real jerks.
"Life is a hospital
in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed.
One would prefer to suffer near the fire,
and another is certain he would get well
if he were by the window."
- Charles Baudelaire
Brady Bunch reruns. And remakes of reruns.
"Life is a constant oscillation
between the sharp horns of a dilemma."
- H. L. Mencken
We look out into nature, and see an incessant churning about of animals and plants trying desperately to keep alive. All of them will fail.
backward and forward
between pain and boredom."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Old Yeller, and Bambie's mom. 'Nuff said.
"Failure: When your best
just isn't good enough."
"All of life is a struggle.
It's a struggle just to get out of bed in the morning.
You're fighting gravity all day long."
- Richard Rose
We are, for the most part, either conscious of our misery, or unconscious of our misery.
Pollyanna was wrong.
"Life is like an onion:
you peel off layer after layer
and then you find there is nothing in it."
- James Gibbons Huneker
Even Spiritual Giants don't really get along with each other.
"Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game
and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards."
- Theodore Dreiser
Most things we want, we will not get. Most of the time, if we do get them, we will not be satisfied with them.
Most goals and dreams we have, we probably won't realize. But, even if we do realize the goals and dreams we have, we'll probably discover that it were the wrong goal or dream to start with. So, we starting working on another one.
". . . take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur and a woe.
But from the same point, take mankind in the mass,
and for the most part,
they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates . . ."
- Herman Melville
We slave away, working very hard for our entire lives. Why, and good does it do? Normally, we have no idea why, we just do.
Seat belts, sometimes, kill people.
"In the great game of human life
one begins by being a dupe
and ends by being a rogue."
- Voltaire
Nature has constructed things in the following manner: with predictable consistency, nature, by design, makes arguably the most innocent, gentle, and perceptive beings on the planet (little children) completely naive, powerless, inarticulate, and utterly dependent on what are often ignorant, obsessed, half-sane, power-hungry beings who gave birth to them.
"We hear that all of creation is 'for the glory of God,'
and we cannot help but ponder
the quality of glory that must be rendered
from the reduction of millions of beautiful beings
into soul-less, senseless fertilizer."
- Richard Rose
"There are moments
when I teeter on the edge of belief that nature cares.
The occasion may be mundane. I may be raking leaves of a gray fall day,
drinking a glass of wine with my wife, Suzie, on our deck at sunset,
waiting with my son and daughter at the end of the driveway
for the morning school bus to arrive.
Gratitude wells up in me as a kind of yearning, as strong as hunger or sexual desire.
I want to thank someone, something, for all that I have . . .
. . . (Yet) A God who deserves thanks
for my good fortune, I had to remind myself,
also deserves blame for the misery of countless others.
Thanking this God for all I have would be obscene.
I would be saying, in effect, "Thank you, God,
for not screwing me
like you've screwed all those other poor bastards."
- John Horgan
Those individuals who see that life, under normal conditions, is hell, become the target of those who happen not to believe that life is hell. Thus, those individuals are routinely criticized, insulted, mocked, misunderstood, ganged up upon, set up to be humiliated, and called names. This does not successfully change their opinion,
"If a man could understand
all the horror of the lives of ordinary people
who are turning round in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims,
if he could understand what they are losing,
he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him -
to escape from the general law, to be free.
What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death?
Only one thing: how to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious."
- G. I. Gurdjieff
Everything in the universe is eating everything else.
"The horror!
The horror! "
- Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
and Marlon Brando, Apocalypse Now
Death is an inevitable certainty.
Lots of people say that death isn't the end. But what do they know?
". . . But the time came when I stopped growing;
I felt that I was not growing but drying up.
My muscles were growing weaker, my teeth were falling out,
and I saw not only that this law explained nothing to me . . . "
- Leo Tolstoy
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