Andy Taylor
Neil Young
On a Good Day
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Jean - Paul Sartre walks into a café, and the waiter asks what he'd like to order. Sartre replies, " I'd like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream." The waiter goes off, but comes back apologising. "I'm sorry Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream. How about with no milk?"
Quoted from the film Ninotchka, in the excellent "At The Existentialist Café. Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails" by Sarah Bakewell
This is relatively lengthy but I love it. It's a passage from Wright Morris' novel, The Huge Season. A truncated version precedes the novel Bang the Drum Slowly and that's how I discovered this book.
"What's your novel about?" I said and glanced at the yellow sheets on the desk. A small pile of typed sheets were in the case for his typewriter. A big photograph of Lawrence, smashing one away, was under the jelly glass full of sharpened pencils. "It wouldn't be about a tennis player?" I said.
He wiped his face with the towel again. "Old man, a book can have Chicago in it, and not be about Chicago. It can have a tennis player in it without being about a tennis player."
I didn't get it. I probably looked it, for he went on, "Take this book here, old man--" and held up one of the books he had swiped from some library. Along with the numbers I could see Hemingway's name on the spine. "There's a prizefighter in it, old man, but it's not about a prizefighter."
"Is it about the sun rising?" I said. I knew that was part of the title.
"Goddam if I know what it's about," he said and opened it up, as if he might have overlooked it.
Aren't y'all just chatty today.
I've been reading a good bit of Wilde lately and, as with Twain and Rogers, I'm simply amazed at the timelessness of the occasional Transcendent Mind among our species: "The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy."
Strider88! Next thing you know CosmicBadger will be revived from reported extinction...Gosh I miss you guys.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.