May 2011
30 posts
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“What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so...”
– Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 1989 Hannay translation.
April 2011
53 posts
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“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and...”
– Marcus Aurelius, in book IV of his Meditations.
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“Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d...”
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses.”
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I just want to point out that, until yesterday, I sincerely believed that there was a teen romantic comedy/drama coming out along the lines of The Princess Diaries called The Royal Wedding.
I am even more disappointed now that I know the truth.
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How can you tell that the democratic republic is...
Next person you see, ask them who leads America, or an equivalent democratic republic.
Chances are they’ll say Barack Obama, or the equivalent executive post with broad discretionary power.
Ask an Athenian who led democratic Athens, and he’d say, “no one,” or “Athenians,” or “the people.”
Do you see the difference?
tuniosiorpotrs-deactivated20110 asked: I enjoy how you've actively sought to repel followers. It's unusual given the activities of most on this platform.
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thesensualstarfish asked: I so enjoyed your "Writing is like Sex" this morning as I sipped my coffee.
Rarely do I have the attention span this early, but I found myself shaking my head at each line.
Nodding, "yes"--- you so get it!
It is the same for women who write, even if they don't write very well. :)
It gets in your blood and then you're screwed.
See,...
Rarely do I have the attention span this early, but I found myself shaking my head at each line.
Nodding, "yes"--- you so get it!
It is the same for women who write, even if they don't write very well. :)
It gets in your blood and then you're screwed.
See,...
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Oh shit, I’m gaining followers. Time to post some obscure bullshit before this goes too far!
Gylfe answered that his name was Ganglere; that he had come a long way, and that he sought lodgings for the night. He also asked who owned the burg. The other answered that it belonged to their king: I will go with you to see him and then you may ask him for his name yourself. Then the man...
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So: roughly nineteen hundred eighty years ago in a remote province of the Roman empire, an itinerant mystic and philosopher was falsely accused of sedition and summarily executed by means of flogging and exposure. According to his followers, after dying, he came back to life in the tomb, promising that they too would be granted an exception to entropy, a way to escape the inevitable decay of a...
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“Thus, let a man sow a field or plant a farm never so well, yet he cannot...”
– Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1897 Dakyns translation.
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If I see one more article commenting on the “Nice Guy versus Bad Boy” dichotomy, I’m going to swear a blood oath to decimate Cosmo, Seventeen, and whichever other womens’ magazines first had a hand in propagating this hot bag of smashed ass that masquerades as psychological insight.
That’s decimate in the Roman sense, of executing all the leadership (possibly by...
Problems I have with South Florida clubs include: vanilla vodka (man was not meant to adulterate liquor with such heresies), Dave Matthews Band singles, 45-year-old divorcees on their third martini, the disco ball.
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I find that the older I get, the more I want to spend time with only the kind of people who are capable of and practice extensively the ability to deny themselves things that they want in the service of a greater purpose.
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colorasbeginning-deactivated201 asked: Women are lying when they say they don't notice height. We notice everything.
However, nine times out of ten we choose men based on what they are about. What they have to say. Their ambition and passion toward something.
Yes, we think you are something hot if you are six feet tall, but if we had to choose between a six foot tall douche bag and a five foot four passionate...
However, nine times out of ten we choose men based on what they are about. What they have to say. Their ambition and passion toward something.
Yes, we think you are something hot if you are six feet tall, but if we had to choose between a six foot tall douche bag and a five foot four passionate...
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Kay Steiger on dating (and not dating) short men →
ronaldallen:
jamiedrew:
At 5’4” I can honestly say that there has never been a problem in this regard, but there is a lot of stuff on top of that which make for much more acceptable reasons not to go out with me. There’s a lot of “personality stuff,” y’know? I make a lot of jokes about Pokémon.
This isn’t angst, by the way, just observations. My girlfriend is also 5’4” and a complete sucker...
Nothin’ quite like the pure jaunty freedom of the open road. Interstate 26 peels away before me, stretching and cracking like the rind of some terribly overbaked fruit; as the coast nears I can taste a little salt on the free air, and then I-95 will roar open into the boiling heat of beach and swamp, and here I go again.
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Why is there a quote from Jodi Picoult featured under the #prose tag? Why is this acceptable?
How about we create a new tag: #proseforpeoplewhoread
frail-beauty-deactivated2011092 asked: "Am I the only person who considers it strange that so many dudes take pictures of just their eyes or just their necks? It’s like they’re afraid everyone will find out they’re not Robert Redford. Christ."
They obviously enjoy eyeball sex and vampiric neck action.
That is the only reasonable explanation I can come up with.
Either way you...
They obviously enjoy eyeball sex and vampiric neck action.
That is the only reasonable explanation I can come up with.
Either way you...
colvinwilt-deactivated20130523 asked: finally a word from you. i thought you had scratched me off your universe. :(
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“Self-will will never be satisfied, though it should have command of all it...”
– Blaise Pascal, Pensées.
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“What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a...”
– Blaise Pascal, Pensées.
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In Thys Chapell
The university police rushed him to the hospital, but their urgency was lost on him. The sight and sound, sirens and surgical masks and scrubs the yellow-green of illness all blended together. He barely knew his body was broken, lightly remembered seeing the shard of twisted fender couched in the wreck and driven to his head like a sword. There were flashes of pain like lightning striking through...
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Wilco, “Hell Is Chrome,” from A Ghost...
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Where The Roads Go
Sometimes I think about what we did, when we built the roads, their endless loops: there is no single point of entry, no exit; hundreds of millions of glittering rusting cars, run their routes, merging, changing lanes, waiting at stoplights, turn signals flashing, headlights running through the coal-black night, pistons churning, oilslick gearboxes and hissing radiators wandering with no singular...
856856 asked: What are your feelings on the subject of pre-destiny?
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Appendix To My Writing Manifesto; Or, Things I...
Use of the serial comma: it’s not important to anyone who matters.
Concepts such as “Love,” “Home,” “Beauty,” or “Truth” should only be capitalized within a sentence if one is either a) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or b) a teenager raised on whatever cultural currency is now semantically equivalent to Further Seems Forever or c) intending never...
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So I’m drinking beer in bed and watching The Lion In Winter at 3:30 in the morning. You want to make somethin’ of it? Also—dude, has anyone written Richard the Lionheart fanfiction yet? Tell me I didn’t just blow your mind.
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Building The Long Weekend
She is thinking of him Sunday evening of the long weekend away from the firm. He had thin lips that she loved to watch curl in amusement at his own rare jokes. His eyes were studied and precisely contained behind wire-rimmed glasses. She loved the way he sat at his desk. How he would steeple his fingers and lean forward on his elbows when someone presented him an idea for comment. His words...
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“Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar...”
– T.S. Eliot, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.”
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“EDWARD: But I am obsessed with the thought of my own insignificance.
REILLY:...”
– T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party.
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Idols
The pornography was sitting there on the coffee table of the photographer’s office when he walked in. It was high quality. Fabric-bound and glossy-jacketed books of nature photography with naked women in them. He wasn’t sure it was really pornography until he opened it because of the names on the spines, names like The Ruin of Hotblooded Youth and Turbulent Creek. The names of the...
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Writing is like sex, redux
Writing is like sex You do your thing And every time they say: Oh! How wonderful! And you will never know if it’s because You’re any good Or because they’d rather not tell you You’re nothing special
Writing is like sex Sometimes it seems like all there is, Is teenage girls Who don’t know anything And old guys Who talk about it too much
You do it because you have to,...
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“Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right...”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
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Writing is like sex
Writing is like sex You do your thing And every time they say: Oh! How wonderful! And you will never know if it’s because You’re any good Or because they’d rather not tell you You’re nothing special
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“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain...”
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon.
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Today's Used Book Purchases, Unabridged
Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway.
The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950, T.S. Eliot.
The Ebony Tower, John Fowles.
The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, 1957 Graves translation.
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene.
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene.
I, Claudius, Robert Graves.
Dream of the Red Chamber, Tsao Hsueh-chin, 1958 Chi-chen translation.
The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton.
The...
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“What was her beauty in our first estate
When Adam’s will was whole, and the...”
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“She,” by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate Richard Wilbur, appeared in the November 1958 issue of The Atlantic. This week, we’ll be highlighting Richard Wilbur’s poetry from our archives.
Do you have a favorite poem? Tweet it to us @TheAtlantic with the hashtag... 