We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:23pm on August 18, 2018Girls come to think of themselves as ‘positioned in space’ rather than as defining or constituting the space around them by their movements.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:23pm on August 18, 2018Sartre examined a character, Lucien, who shores up an identity for himself as an anti-Semite mainly in order to be something. He is pleased when he hears someone else say of him, ‘Lucien can’t stand Jews.’ It gives him the illusion that he simply is the way he is. Bad faith here makes an entity out of a nonentity.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:22pm on August 18, 2018As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:21pm on August 18, 2018Camus concludes his book with Sisyphus resuming his endless task while resigning himself to its absurdity. Thus: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:21pm on August 18, 2018A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:21pm on August 18, 2018What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:20pm on August 18, 2018He insisted on being nice to everyone. ‘I feel myself to be so different!’ she cried. She was a creature of strong judgements, while he looked for multiple sides to any situation. He considered people a mixture of qualities, and liked to give them the benefit of the doubt, whereas in youth she saw humanity as consisting of ‘a small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration’.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:20pm on August 18, 2018To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:20pm on August 18, 2018There is a part of everything that remains unexplored, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:19pm on August 18, 2018They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:19pm on August 18, 2018Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 5:19pm on August 18, 2018Heidegger ‘states the obvious in a way that even philosophers can grasp’.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell 2:27pm on August 18, 2018But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau 2:26pm on August 18, 2018I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau 2:26pm on August 18, 2018Every child begins the world again, to some extent.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau 2:26pm on August 18, 2018He considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau 2:25pm on August 18, 2018No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau 2:24pm on August 18, 2018I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau 2:24pm on August 18, 2018Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:24pm on August 18, 2018