Posts Tagged ‘Schopenhauer’
In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with orchids. The truth is often painful and difficult to acknowledge, particularly when there’s no way to change it. Those who try to deny this do so at great cost. If you ignore what’s ugly about life, how can you possibly see the beauty?
Filed under: Decay, Disease, Dissonance, GWB Project, Orchids, Pessimism, Writers-German | Leave a Comment
Tags: Beauty, orange, Orchids, Schopenhauer, Truth, Ugly
In which The Gay Recluse looks out windows. Eventually we reached an age when we could no longer think about the larger world except with terror; it was too complicated and cruel, and every time we tried to engage it we returned defeated and misunderstood. Our own trajectory, combined with an examination of world history […]
Filed under: Faith, History, Literature, Longing, Memory, Philosophers | Leave a Comment
Tags: Candle Holders, Schopenhauer, Sky
In which The Gay Recluse questions the kind of man who berates a 75-year old woman for being pro-choice. Our mother — who lives near Pittsburgh in the “swing-state” of Pennsylvania — has been going to physical therapy lately because she hurt her foot. She goes during the day, when a lot of the other […]
Filed under: Gay, Government, Health, Landscape, Law, Pessimism, Politicians | Leave a Comment
Tags: Abortion, John McCain, Physical Therapy, Pro-Choice, Republican Assholes, Sarah Palin, Schopenhauer
In which Dante hates pigeons and windows. Friends! We are literally confronted by this thing we hate — we would kill it in a second if given even the slightest opportunity! — yet must resign ourselves to our inability to do anything about it. (Also: not every cat is a lolcat.)
Filed under: Animals, Not Every Cat a Lolcat, Resignation, The Gay Recluse, The Russian Blue | 2 Comments
Tags: Birds, Enemies, Lolcats, Not Every Cat a Lolcat, Pigeons, Schopenhauer
In our daily travels, we are regularly confronted by some of our more clever but literal-minded critics with the question of why we would ever want to publish our thoughts and observations, if in fact it is our unending desire to be reclusive, or to obtain — in our own lexicon — a “community-free” existence. […]
Filed under: Gay, Infrastructure, Philosophers, Resignation, The Gay Recluse, The Winter Garden, Weather, Writers-German | Leave a Comment
Tags: Best of 2007, Community, Corsican Mint, Deserts, Gy Rclus, Gy Rcluse, Gy Recluse, Kant, Schopenhauer, Search Engines, Site Meter
In yesterday’s Times, we were told that Italy has sunk to new depths of despair on many fronts, “struggling as few other countries do with fractured politics, uneven growth, organized crime and a tenuous sense of nationhood.” There is widespread malaise, or malessere. Quoted is Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome: “It’s a country that […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Decay, History, Nostalgia, Resignation, The Gay Recluse, Travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: Economy, GNP, Italy, Schopenhauer, The New York Times, Turin, Venice
To the brave soul who trapped a mouse in a gluetrap and left it in the hallway, bravo! We would like to commend you for digging so deep and summoning the courage to carry such a ferocious beast — did you use your bare hands? — to the elevator, where we and countless others were […]
Filed under: Government, History, Philosophers, Resignation, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Compassion, Courage, George W. Bush, GOP, Karma, Mice, Mouse, Schopenhauer
We leave work and walk the long blocks from Madison to Sixth Avenue. We hurry down the stairs into the station, where we mindlessly extract our card from our wallet and slide it through the reader. In the distance we can sense the deep, subterranean rumble of what is surely an empty uptown D-train approaching […]
Filed under: Infrastructure, Longing, Resignation, Subway, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: D-Train, Fate, God, Homophobia, Karma, MTA, New York City, Pessimism, Proletariat, Schopenhauer, Subway
We turn again to New York Times critic Edward Rothstein — who today wrote about the “irrelevance of gayness” with regard to the fictional wizard Albus Dumbledore –and shake our heads in wonder and dismay: how did such an arrogant, presumptuous blockhead get a PhD? a job with the Times? We must conclude that it […]
Filed under: Drivel, Gay, Obsession, Philosophers, The Times, Writers-German | Leave a Comment
Tags: Albus Dumbledore, Edward Rothstein, Gay, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer
On One Important Difference Between Pets and Children and What It Tells Us About U.S. Foreign Policy
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we have two couples, roughly similar in every indicator of socioeconomic status, and that money is not a determinative factor in this hypothetical. Let’s also assume that both are offered the opportunity 1) to have (or adopt) a child, or 2) to adopt a pet. A further […]
Filed under: Drag Queens, Gay, History, Pessimism, Philosophers, Writers-German | Leave a Comment
Tags: Children, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Pets, Schopenhauer, USA, War
Although we admire the spirit in which Andrew Sullivan — inspired by Nietzsche’s timelessly apt tirade against moral crusaders — compares America to a “very insecure adolescent” we feel the analogy is nonetheless somewhat off the mark. We by contrast would prefer to compare America to a brittle (but dangerous) old man, unwilling to resign himself to the inevitable fate that awaits us all.
Filed under: Philosophers, Politicians, Resignation, The Gay Recluse, Writers-German | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Morality, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer
On What Is Confirmed at Auto Tour Stop #9 on The Whiteface Mountain Veterans Memorial Highway
“If you turn around now, and face the mountain, notice how dwarfed the trees just above the parking lot are; small, contorted by the wind, branches broken from the load of ice in the winter, spring growth killed off by late spring frosts, soil so thin and impoverished as to defy definition, the whole scene […]
Filed under: Longing, Pessimism, Philosophers, Travel | Leave a Comment
Tags: Adirondacks, Nature, Schopenhauer, The Smiths, Whiteface Mountain
The Eastern White Pines cover the rolling hills like a sphagnum moss, dotted with patches of silver (the Quaking Aspens, shimmering like schools of fish) and the burned red of the Sugar Maples. A little higher up these give way to spruces — tall, drooping and dignified — hemlocks, birches — whose gnarled white trunks […]
Filed under: Good Rock, Longing, Pessimism, The Autumn Garden, Travel | Closed
Tags: Adirondacks, Maple, Route 87, Schopenhauer, Spruce, White Pine
In response to the criticism by us and many others of her article on Thelma and Louise, Judith Warner in her latest column in The Times has come back to the table, prepared to admit how “shocked” she was by the reaction, but nevertheless maintaining that “[since] the 1970s and 1980s… I [can] attest to […]
Filed under: Drivel, Pessimism, The Times, Washington Heights | Leave a Comment
Tags: Judith Warner, New York Times, Schopenhauer, Thelma and Louise, Washington Heights
In yesterday’s Times, we read an “Op-Extra” column by Judith Warner called ‘Thelma and Louise’ in the Rear-View Mirror,” in which we were informed that such a “dark” and “disturbing” movie could not have been made in the present, given that in 1991, “[a]ll the talk, nationally, was of sexual harassment, date rape and crimes […]
Filed under: The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrea Feldman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Judith Warner, Schopenhauer, The New York Times, Thelma and Louise
The Gay Recluse 