“
It's like the piano and the cello are being poured into my body, the same way the IV and blood transfusions are. And the memories of my life as it was, and the flashes of it as it might be, are coming so fast and furious. I feel like I can no longer keep up with them but they keep coming and everything is colliding, until I cannot take anymore. Until I cannot be like this a second longer.
”
”
Gayle Forman (If I Stay (If I Stay, #1))
“
Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment.
”
”
American Psychiatric Association (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV)
“
He was the friend of the king, who honored highly, as everyone knows, the memory of his father, Henry IV.
”
”
Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers (The D'Artagnan Romances, #1))
“
In the past, bad literature was made with high-flown sentiment; today, it is made with the unconscious.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
Paths of the mirror"
I
And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true.
II
But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from my fear like a bird from the sharp
edge of the night.
III
Like a girl made of pink chalk on a very old wall that is suddenly washed away by the rain.
IV
Like when a flower blooms and reveals the heart that isn’t there.
V
Every gesture of my body and my voice to make myself into the offering,
the bouquet that is abandoned by
the wind on the porch.
VI
Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you will be and scare the girl you once were.
VII
The night of us both scattered with the fog. It’s the season of cold foods.
VIII
And the thirst, my memory is of the thirst, me underneath, at the bottom, in the hole,
I drank, I remember.
IX
To fall like a wounded animal in a place that was meant to be for revelations.
X
As if it meant nothing. No thing. Mouth zipped. Eyelids sewn. I forgot.
Inside, the wind. Everything closed and the wind inside.
XI
Under the black sun of the silence the words burned slowly.
XII
But the silence is true. That’s why I write. I’m alone and I write. No, I’m not alone.
There’s somebody here shivering.
XIII
Even if I say sun and moon and star I’m talking about things that happen to me. And what did I wish for? I wished for a perfect silence.
That’s why I speak.
XIV
The night is shaped like a wolf’s scream.
XV
Delight of losing one-self in the presaged image. I rose from my corpse, I went looking for who I am.
Migrant of myself, I’ve gone towards the one who sleeps in a country of wind.
XVI
My endless falling into my endless falling where nobody waited for me –because when I saw who was waiting for me I saw no one but myself.
XVII
Something was falling in the silence. My last word was “I” but I was talking about the luminiscent dawn.
XVIII
Yellow flowers constellate a circle of blue earth. The water trembles full of wind.
XIX
The blinding of day, yellow birds in the morning. A hand untangles the darkness, a hand drags
the hair of a drowned woman that never stops going through the mirror. To return to the memory of the body,
I have to return to my mourning bones, I have to understand what my voice is saying.
”
”
Alejandra Pizarnik (Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972)
“
A liar should have a good memory. —Quintilian, Institutions Oratoriae, iv. 2, 91
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Vanishing Acts)
“
the essential feature of the Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity,or perception
”
”
American Psychiatric Association (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR)
“
In the past, catharsis was the purification of the passions by fire. Today it is their liquidation by flow.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
We are God's Memory Palace. We are an interactive holographic construct of dynamic memory being visualized by a higher form of consciousness.
”
”
Jann Burner (The Journal of A Perimeter Man, Vol. IV, Metaphor Bridge)
“
However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me.
”
”
Chuck Klosterman (Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas)
“
You might think that life is not as good as it used to be but the younger generation happens to think that life is wonderful. Maybe they just do not know how great things were, when you were their age. Having said that, when you were young, the older generation complained about life too and reminisced about the good old days. This pattern cannot simply be explained by the tendency of the human psyche to erase all negative memories leaving just the positive ones. The criticism is aimed at the present moment which is supposedly worse than it used to be. If you accept the fact that life is getting worse with every passing year then you would have to agree that the world should have simply fallen to pieces a long time ago. An uncountable number of generations have passed since the beginning of human history and each one believes that life’s colours have faded. Many an old man will tell you with absolute certainty how much better Coca-Cola used to be. Coca-Cola was invented in 1886. Imagine how disgusting coke must be by now if it has been consistently worsening in quality since
”
”
Vadim Zeland (Reality Transurfing Steps I-V)
“
One world moved on, the next came to life around you, and before you knew it, things that had been normal and accepted were nothing more than late-night reruns and memories to be shared over a beer.
”
”
David Niall Wilson (The DeChance Chronicles Omnibus: Books I - IV)
“
Very few people know where they will die,
But I do; in a brick-faced hospital,
Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,
Into three parts; the Dean Memorial
Wing, in the classic cast of 1910,
Green-grated in unglazed, Aeolian
Embrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, which
Commemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitch
Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees
In World War I, and won enlisted men
Some decent hospitals, and, being rich,
Donated her own granite monument;
The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tent
With marble piping, flying snapping flags
Above the entry where our bloody rags
Are rolled in to be sponged and sewn again.
Today is fair; tomorrow, scourging rain
(If only my own tears) will see me in
Those jaundiced and distempered corridors
Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close.
White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringe
Before the pinpoint of the least syringe;
Before the buttered catheter goes in;
Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip begins
Inside my skin; before the rubber hand
Upon the lancet takes aim and descends
To lay me open, and upon its thumb
Retracts the trouble, a malignant plum;
And finally, I’ll quail before the hour
When the authorities shut off the power
In that vast hospital, and in my bed
I’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red,
The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead.
Then will the business of life resume:
The muffled trolley wheeled into my room,
The off-white blanket blanking off my face,
The stealing secret, private, largo race
Down halls and elevators to the place
I’ll be consigned to for transshipment, cased
In artificial air and light: the ward
That’s underground; the terminal; the morgue.
Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,
A booted man in black with a peaked cap
Will call for me and troll me down the hall
And slot me into his black car. That’s all.
”
”
L.E. Sissman
“
Freedom is not as free as is generally thought: it produces antibodies which rebel against it. Truth, too, is threatened from within, like a state battling with its own police force. If values enjoyed total immunity, they would be as lethal as a scientific truth.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
Still tethered to an IV and woozy from anesthesia, Maria held Jonah and anointed him with her tears. She pressed her face to his, trying to freeze this final moment in her memory. She inhaled the smell of her newborn, ran her nose over his soft cheeks, and said goodbye.
”
”
Rebecca Medina Stewart (Seen: Experiencing God's Tenderness After Brokenness)
“
The heroes of humanitarian action are applauded: a good thing they're there to rescue our honour! If you denounce this shroud-waving, again there is applause: thank goodness you're there to say these things! It is often the same people who applaud. Sycophants, catechumens, proselytes, acolytes - to arms, all of you!
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
Exoteric machines - esoteric machines.
They say the computer is an improved form of typewriter. Not a bit of it. I collude with my typewriter, but the relationship is otherwise clear and distant. I know it is a machine; it knows it is a machine. There is nothing here of the interface, verging on biological confusion, between a computer thinking it is a brain and me thinking I am a computer.
The same familiarity with good old television, where I was and remained a spectator. It was an esoteric machine, whose status as machine I respected. Nothing there of all these screens and interactive devices, including the 'smart' car of the future and the 'smart' house. Even the mobile phone, that incrustation of the network in your head, even the skateboard and rollerblades - mobility aids - are of a quite different generation from the good old static telephone or the velocipedic machine. New manners and a new morality are emerging as a result of this organic confusion between man and his prostheses - a confusion which puts an end to the instrumental pact and the integrity of the machine itself.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
All our current media concerns have in French the suffix '-aire': identitaire (issues of identity), sanitaire (health concerns), securitaire ('law and order'), humanitaire (humanitarianism). The whole lot being publicitaire (promotional). There is in this suffix something which quite aptly characterizes our culture as funerarium of received ideas and single-track thinking.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
Did you know,” a doctor named Mark Souweidane told me on a visit to Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York, “that when we put chemo through an IV to treat a brain tumor, only three percent of it actually gets to the brain? There’s something called a blood/brain barrier, a membrane that’s very selective about what it lets in. Three percent. The rest just stays in the bloodstream.
”
”
Mitch Albom (Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family)
“
Secondary-school pupils are demanding more school, more funding, more staff, more security. Nineteenth-century demands. School is finished. All we can do is transform it into a gigantic Web cafe. In their own heads, the school students have already moved over into multimedia and the twenty-first century, as is attested by the incongruity of the demonstrations, including the incongruity of the anachronistic violence of the hooligan element.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfilment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping-ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfilment of the dream.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
The almost timeless curvature of the space of ideas obeys neither chronology nor history. So the thoughts of Sade and Fourier are like anticipated repercussions of the theories of Marx and Freud, of which they are a much more radical critique avant la lettre than any that were to follow, exerting their effects only posthumously. To reread the world of ideas against the grain of the ideology of the Enlightenment, the ideology of a chronological order of events.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
In the classical imagination, Evil was still a mythical power. There was still a Mephisto or a Frankenstein to embody the principle of Evil. Our evil is faceless and without imagination. We no longer need the Devil to steal our shadows. There are no powers doing battle above our heads, fighting over our souls. No longer any need for the lubricious agency of capital to extort our labour-power from us. We no longer have any shadows, any souls, and we are stakeholders in our own lives.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
“
I’ve had one or two occasions in my life when the proverbial red mist has descended. I’m not proud of them, but they happen occasionally. This was one of those occasions. I have no memory of getting out of bed, or even of the next few minutes at all, but when, finally, I came to rest, I was standing, panting and in pain, by the window, tangled in tubes, with IV drips on the floor, the fruit bowl in tiny fragments, the window broken, the bedclothes on the floor, and one of the pillows ripped to shreds and bits of it floating everywhere.
”
”
Jodi Taylor (No Time Like the Past (The Chronicles of St. Mary's, #5))
“
We shall never now be able to arrive at any judgment of the full scale of what took place, of the number who perished, or of the standard they might have attained. No one will ever tell us about the notebooks hurriedly burned before departures on prisoner transports, or of the completed fragments and big schemes carried in heads and cast together with those heads into frozen mass graves. Verses can be read, lips close to ear; they can be remembered, and they or the memory of them can be communicated. But prose cannot be passed on before its time. It is harder for it to survive. It is too bulky, too rigid, too bound up with paper, to pass through the vicissitudes of the Archipelago.
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV)
“
He was almost at his door when Vik’s earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. “Vik?”
He reached Vik’s doorway as Vik was backing out of it. “Tom,” he breathed, “it’s an abomination.”
Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too.
Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik’s bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt’s solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW?
Tom began to laugh.
“She didn’t do it to the bunk,” Vik insisted. “She must’ve done something to our processors.”
That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved.
He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik’s more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that time Vik got a computer virus that convinced him he was a sheep, and he’d crawled around on his hands and knees chewing on plants in the arboretum. Another was Vik gaping in dismay as Wyatt won the war games.
“My hands do not look like that.” Vik jabbed a finger at the statue and its abnormally tiny hands. Wyatt had relentlessly mocked Vik for having small, delicate hands ever since Tom had informed her it was the proper way to counter one of Vik’s nicknames for her, “Man Hands.” Vik had mostly abandoned that nickname for “Evil Wench,” and Tom suspected it was due to the delicate-hands gibe.
Just then, Vik’s new roommate bustled into the bunk.
He was a tall, slim guy with curly black hair and a pointy look to his face. Tom had seen him around, and he called up his profile from memory:
NAME: Giuseppe Nichols
RANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Alexander Division
ORIGIN: New York, NY
ACHIEVEMENTS: Runner-up, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition
IP: 2053:db7:lj71::291:ll3:6e8
SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4
Giuseppe must’ve been able to see the bunk template, too, because he stuttered to a stop, staring up at the statue. “Did you really program a giant statue of yourself into your bunk template? That’s so narcissistic.”
Tom smothered his laughter. “Wow. He already has your number, man.”
Vik shot him a look of death as Tom backed out of the bunk.
”
”
S.J. Kincaid
“
But what separates human consciousness from the consciousness of animals? Humans are alone in the animal kingdom in understanding the concept of tomorrow. Unlike animals, we constantly ask ourselves “What if?” weeks, months, and even years into the future, so I believe that Level III consciousness creates a model of its place in the world and then simulates it into the future, by making rough predictions. We can summarize this as follows: Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time, by evaluating the past to simulate the future. This requires mediating and evaluating many feedback loops in order to make a decision to achieve a goal. By the time we reach Level III consciousness, there are so many feedback loops that we need a CEO to sift through them in order to simulate the future and make a final decision. Accordingly, our brains differ from those of other animals, especially in the expanded prefrontal cortex, located just behind the forehead, which allows us to “see” into the future. Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, has written, “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an ‘anticipation machine,’ and ‘making the future’ is the most important thing it does.” Using brain scans, we can even propose a candidate for the precise area of the brain where simulation of the future takes place. Neurologist Michael Gazzaniga notes that “area 10 (the internal granular layer IV), in the lateral prefrontal cortex, is almost twice as large in humans as in apes. Area 10 is involved with memory and planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, initiating appropriate behavior, and inhibiting inappropriate behavior, learning rules, and picking out relevant information from what is perceived through the senses.” (For this book, we will refer to this area, in which decision making is concentrated, as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, although there is some overlap with other areas of the brain.)
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
The SCID-D-R's standard for "distinct identities or personality states"
(DSM-IV, p. 487) is: "Persistent manifestations of the presence of different personalities, as indicated by at least four of the following:
a) ongoing dialogues between different people;
b) acting or feeling that the different people inside of him/her take control of his/her behavior or speech;
c) characteristic visual image that is associated with the other person, distinct from the subject;
d) characteristic age associated with the different people inside of him/her;
e) feeling that the different people inside of him/her have different memories, behaviors, and feelings;
f) feeling that the different people inside of him/her are separate from his/her personality and have lives of their own" (Steinberg, 1994, p. 106).
[The author believes that it is of considerable importance that none of the SCID-D-R's six criteria for "distinct personalities or personality states" are observable signs; each of the six is a subjective symptom or experience that must be reported to the test administrator. This striking fact supports the contention that assessment of dissociation should be based on subjective symptoms rather than signs (Dell, 2006b. 2009b).]
”
”
Paul F. Dell (Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond)
“
THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP
Part IV
If you are mighty, gain respect through knowledge
And through gentleness of speech.
Don’t command except as is fitting,
He who provokes gets into trouble.
Don't be haughty, lest you be humbled,
Don’t be mute, lest you be chided.
When you answer one who is fuming,
Avert your face, control yourself.
The flame of the hot-heart sweeps across.
He who steps gently, his path is paved.
He who frets all day has no happy moment,
He who’s gay all day can’t keep house.
Don’t oppose a great man’s action.
Don’t vex the heart of one who is burdened;
If he gets angry at him who foils him,
The ka will part from him who loves him.
Yet he is the provider along with the god,
What he wishes should be done for him.
When he turns his face back to you after raging,
There will be peace from his ka;
As ill will comes from opposition,.
So goodwill increases love.
Teach the great what is useful to him,
Be his aid before the people;
If you Set his knowledge impress his lord,
Your sustenance will come from his ka
As the favorite's belly is filled.
So your back will be clothed by it,
And his help will be there sustain you.
For your superior whom you love
And who lives by it,
He in turn will give you good support.
Thus will love of you endure
In the belly of those who love you,
He is a ka who loves to listen.
If you are a magistrate of standing.
Commissioned to satisfy the many,
Hew a straight line,
When you speak don't lean to one side.
Beware lest one complain:
“Judges, he distorts the matter!”
And your deed turns into a judgment (of you).
If you are angered by misdeed.
Lean toward a man account of his rightness;
Pass it over, don’t recall it,
Since he was silent to you the first day
If you are great after having been humble,
Have gained wealth after having been poor
In the past, in a town which you know,
Knowing your former condition.
Do not put trust in your wealth,
Which came to you as gift of god;
So that you will not fall behind one like you,
To whom the same has happened,
Bend your back to your superior,
Your overseer from the palace;
Then your house will endure in its wealth.
Your rewards in their right place.
Wretched is he who opposes a superior,
One lives as long as he is mild,
Baring the arm does not hurt it
Do not plunder a neighbor’s house,
Do not steal the goods of one near you,
Lest he denounce you before you are heard
A quarreler is a mindless person,
If he is known as an aggressor
The hostile man will have trouble in the neighborhood.
This maxim is an injunction against illicit sexual intercourse. It is
very obscure and has been omitted here.
If you probe the character of a friend,
Don’t inquire, but approach him,
Deal with him alone,
So as not to suffer from his manner.
Dispute with him after a time,
Test his heart in conversation;
If what he has seen escapes him,
If he does a thing that annoys you,
Be yet friendly with him, don’t attack;
Be restrained, don’t let fly,
Don’t answer with hostility,
Neither part from him nor attack him;
His time does not fail to come,
One does not escape what is fated
Be generous as long as you live,
What leaves the storehouse does not return;
It is the food to be shared which is coveted.
One whose belly is empty is an accuser;
One deprived becomes an opponent,
Don’t have him for a neighbor.
Kindness is a man’s memorial
For the years after the function.
”
”
Miriam Lichtheim (Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms)
“
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
[...]
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you,
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
[...]
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
[...]
II. A Game of Chess
[...]
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
III. The Fire Sermon
[...]
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
[...]
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
[...]
I Tiresias, old man with dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest--
I too awaited the expected guest.
[...]
IV. Death by Water
[...]
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
[...]
V. What the Thunder Said
[...]
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
”
”
T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)
“
this I say,—we must never forget that all the education a man's head can receive, will not save his soul from hell, unless he knows the truths of the Bible. A man may have prodigious learning, and yet never be saved. He may be master of half the languages spoken round the globe. He may be acquainted with the highest and deepest things in heaven and earth. He may have read books till he is like a walking cyclopædia. He may be familiar with the stars of heaven,—the birds of the air,—the beasts of the earth, and the fishes of the sea. He may be able, like Solomon, to "speak of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows on the wall, of beasts also, and fowls, and creeping things, and fishes." (1 King iv. 33.) He may be able to discourse of all the secrets of fire, air, earth, and water. And yet, if he dies ignorant of Bible truths, he dies a miserable man! Chemistry never silenced a guilty conscience. Mathematics never healed a broken heart. All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death. No natural theology ever gave peace in the prospect of meeting a holy God. All these things are of the earth, earthy, and can never raise a man above the earth's level. They may enable a man to strut and fret his little season here below with a more dignified gait than his fellow-mortals, but they can never give him wings, and enable him to soar towards heaven. He that has the largest share of them, will find at length that without Bible knowledge he has got no lasting possession. Death will make an end of all his attainments, and after death they will do him no good at all. A man may be a very ignorant man, and yet be saved. He may be unable to read a word, or write a letter. He may know nothing of geography beyond the bounds of his own parish, and be utterly unable to say which is nearest to England, Paris or New York. He may know nothing of arithmetic, and not see any difference between a million and a thousand. He may know nothing of history, not even of his own land, and be quite ignorant whether his country owes most to Semiramis, Boadicea, or Queen Elizabeth. He may know nothing of the affairs of his own times, and be incapable of telling you whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Commander-in-Chief, or the Archbishop of Canterbury is managing the national finances. He may know nothing of science, and its discoveries,—and whether Julius Cæsar won his victories with gunpowder, or the apostles had a printing press, or the sun goes round the earth, may be matters about which he has not an idea. And yet if that very man has heard Bible truth with his ears, and believed it with his heart, he knows enough to save his soul. He will be found at last with Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, while his scientific fellow-creature, who has died unconverted, is lost for ever. There is much talk in these days about science and "useful knowledge." But after all a knowledge of the Bible is the one knowledge that is needful and eternally useful. A man may get to heaven without money, learning, health, or friends,—but without Bible knowledge he will never get there at all. A man may have the mightiest of minds, and a memory stored with all that mighty mind can grasp,—and yet, if he does not know the things of the Bible, he will make shipwreck of his soul for ever. Woe! woe! woe to the man who dies in ignorance of the Bible! This is the Book about which I am addressing the readers of these pages to-day. It is no light matter what you do with such a book. It concerns the life of your soul. I summon you,—I charge you to give an honest answer to my question. What are you doing with the Bible? Do you read it? HOW READEST THOU?
”
”
J.C. Ryle (Practical Religion Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing Christians)
“
Almost a decade ago, I was browsing in a Barnes & Noble when I came across a book called Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana. It was a music book about a band I liked, so I started paging through it immediately. What I remember are two sentences on the fourth page which discussed how awesome it was that 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was on the radio, and how this was almost akin to America electing a new president: 'It's not that everything will change at once,' wrote the author, 'it's that at least the people have voted for better principles. Nirvana's being on the radio means my own values are winning: I'm no longer in the opposition.' I have never forgotten those two sentences, and there are two reasons why this memory has stuck with me. The first reason is that this was just about the craziest, scariest idea I'd ever stumbled across. The second reason, however, is way worse; what I have slowly come to realize is that most people think this way all the time. They don't merely want to hold their values; they want their values to win. And I suspect this is why people so often feel 'betrayed' by art and consumerism, and by the way the world works. I'm sure the author of Route 666 felt completely 'betrayed' when Limp Bizkit and Matchbox 20 became superfamous five years after Cobain's death and she was forced to return to 'the opposition' ...If you feel betrayed by culture, it's not because you're right and the universe is fucked; it's only because you're not like most other people. But this should make you happy, because—in all likelihood—you hate those other people, anyway. You are being betrayed by a culture that has no relationship to who you are or how you live...
Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here’s the first step to happiness: Don’t get pissed off that people who aren’t you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don’t get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren’t on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn record and play “Maps” all goddamn day (if that’s what you want). Don’t get pissed off because people didn’t vote the way you voted. You knew that the country was polarized, and you knew that half of America is more upset by gay people getting married than it is about starting a war under false pretenses. You always knew that many Americans worry more about God than they worry about the economy, and you always knew those same Americans assume you’re insane for feeling otherwise (just as you find them insane for supporting a theocracy). You knew this was a democracy when you agreed to participate, so you knew this was how things might work out. So don’t get pissed off over the fact that the way you feel about culture isn’t some kind of universal consensus. Because if you do, you will end up feeling betrayed. And it will be your own fault. You will feel bad, and you will deserve it.
Now it’s quite possible you disagree with me on this issue. And if you do, I know what your argument is: you’re thinking, But I’m idealistic. This is what people who want to inflict their values on other people always think; they think that there is some kind of romantic, respectable aura that insulates the inflexible, and that their disappointment with culture latently proves that they’re tragically trapped by their own intellect and good taste. Somehow, they think their sense of betrayal gives them integrity. It does not. If you really have integrity—if you truly live by your ideals, and those ideals dictate how you engage with the world at large—you will never feel betrayed by culture. You will simply enjoy culture more.
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Chuck Klosterman (Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas)
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Michelle shrugged off Sam’s aggression. Her eyes misted with memories. “Our curveball was a brain tumor. A grade IV astrocytoma, to be specific. He tried all the treatments—chemo, radiation, even surgery. Nothing helped alleviate his symptoms or his suffering. He was dying in the most horrible way. Seizures, nausea, blinding headaches, memory loss like an Alzheimer’s patient. I didn’t know what it was like to watch someone I love suffer so much, but I can relate to Julie’s pain because the experience was utterly excruciating.
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Daniel Palmer (Mercy)
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The fact that our Universe (together with the entire Level III multiverse) may be simulatable by a quite short computer program calls into question whether i makes any ontological difference whether simulations are "run" or not. If, as I have argued, the computer need only describe and not compute the history, then the complete description would probably fit on a single memory stick, and no CPU power would be required. It would appear absurd that the existence of this memory stick would have any impact whatsoever on whether the multiverse it describes exists "for real." Even if the existence of the memory stick mattered, some elements of this multiverse will contain an identical memory stick that would "recursively" support its own physical existence. This wouldn't involve any Catch-22, chicken-or-the-egg problem regarding whether the stick or the multiverse was created first, since the multiverse elements are four-dimensional spacetimes, whereas "creation" is of course only a meaningful notion within a spacetime.
So are we simulated? According to the MUH, our physical reality is a mathematical structure, and as such, it exists regardless of whether someone here or elsewhere in the Level IV multiverse writes a computer program to simulate/describe it. The only remaining question is then whether a computer simulation could make our mathematical structure in any meaningful sense exist even more than it already did. If we solve the measure problem, perhaps we'll realize that simulating it would increase its measure slightly, by some fraction of the measure of the mathematical structure within which it's simulated. My guess is that this would be a tiny effect at best, so if asked, "Are we simulated?," I'd bet my money on "No!
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Max Tegmark (Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality)
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Gaelic ritual also moved eastwards and Gaelic bards remembered its atmosphere. The place name of Scone is itself a memory of ancient ceremony. Bards sang of Scoine Sciath-Airde, ‘Scone of the High Shields’, probably a reference to the habit of warriors raising up a new king on their shields. As this precarious rite proceeded, another bardic name added a soundtrack. Scoine Sciath-Bhinne means ‘Scone of the Singing Shields’, the shouts and chants of acclamation as lords and warriors roared approval and support for the king raised on the high shields. Here is what John of Hexham wrote about the coronation of Malcolm IV in 1153: ‘and so all the people of the land, raising up Malcolm, son of Earl Henry, King David’s son (a boy still only 12 years old), established him as king at Scone (as is the custom of the Scottish nation).
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Alistair Moffat (Scotland: A History from Earliest Times)
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We are real only by chance, and immortal without knowing it.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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Current events are an incurable illness.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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With Parity, International Women's Day and, more recently, the Chiennes de Garde, and, more generally, with every claim to victimal difference, women are making themselves a collective laughing stock, alongside gays, with their demand for a bourgeois, legal, marital status.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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A woman is beautiful only if she is naked beneath her clothes. A thought is beautiful only if it is naked beneath language. In other words, violent. Each sentence is the spark of a will to power.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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The Transphilosophical Divide: the point where truth begins to exist on both sides of the line, the point where all contradictory hypotheses can be simultaneously verified.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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If destiny is implacable, that is because you have not known how to please it.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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The perfect criminal is the one who lays claim to the crime he has not committed. Who conceals his innocence behind the mask of crime. He is much harder to unmask.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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Ronald Reagan, struck down by Alzheimer's disease, has simply forgotten he was once President of the United States. Is this really so serious? When he was President he had already forgotten he had been an actor. And isn't it more serious to take yourself for the President of the United States when you are, than to forget you have been when you no longer are?
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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Avoid having power over anyone, unless it be the power of life and death.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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Where accidents happen in succession, there is a kind of instinctive relationship between them. Having once smelled blood, they come running with a passion, impatient to occur in their turn, drawn in by the magnetic field. You become a kind of accident attraction zone. New mothers, for example, are particularly fecund and fertile. We underestimate this capacity which events - particularly unfortunate events - have of reproducing themselves not sexually but by contiguity, by 'kairo- genesis'.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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Some thoughts can arise simultaneously in more than one brain, just as the human species emerged simultaneously in more than one region of the globe. Or is it a case of ideas sliding around within a single brain, shared by certain persons at a particular moment - like that 40,000-tree forest in the north of Canada all joined together, constituting one immense organic being? However that may be, nothing is more disturbing than a thought being expressed by someone else at the very moment it is being born in your head - like the advance, muted echo of a piece of music before the orchestra actually strikes up.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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In addition, Sultan Iltumish, for all his rhetoric of being India's sole legitimate Muslim ruler, continued to issue coins with the old bull-and-horseman motif and a Sanskritized form of his name and title: 'Suratana Sri Samsadina', the latter referring to his given name, Shams al-Din. He also enlarged Delhi's Qutb mosque by three times in order to accomodate the many immigrants from beyond the Khyber who had flocked to Delhi during his reign. And he added three storeys to the city's famous minaret, the Qutb Minar. Notably, he placed a seven-metre iron pillar in the centre of the mosque's oldest courtyard, on a direct axis with its main prayer chamber. Originally installed in a Vishnu temple to announce the military victories of a fourth-or-fifth century Indian king, the pillar was now associated with Iltumish and his own victories. In transplanting the pillar in this way, the Sultan broke with Islamic architectural conventions while conforming to Indian political traditions. For in 1164, within living memory of Iltumish's installations of the Vishnu pillar in Delhi's great mosque, Vigraharaja IV Chauhan (r. 1150-64) recorded his own conquests on the same stone pillar on which the emperor Ashoka had published an edict back in the third century BC.
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Richard M. Eaton (India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765)
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It Is Well
When peace like a river attendeth my way
In hospice beds with potent meds
And the babbling sound of the IV drip
When sorrow like sea billows roll
In teeth ground to shards that chink
On the shores of words that cannot be said
Whatever my lot
Even decades of loss as the memories
Ride on the tides, gone away
Thou hast taught me to say
With a fire in the soul that blazed out of control
Even when breakers thundered and rolled
It is well with my soul.
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Laura Kauffman (Carolina Clay: A Collection of Poems on Love and Loss)
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The sudden cancellation of a planned event or of some decision or other is one of those subtle pleasures with which chance occasionally blesses us.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)