Monday, December 2, 2013

Perhaps this means something.

The following is random selections from books on my shelf strung together like a macaroni necklace.

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took into his head to say, “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. Inside, you’ll read about one company that’s taking a huge stake in China’s new pebble bed reactor development. You can trade this one right on the New York Stock Exchange. A bride-to-be would do well to ask herself, “Can my sweetheart manage money?” “Does he know how to live within his means?” These are more important questions than, “Can he earn a lot of money?”

The essential condition for the existence of sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between laborers. 3. Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws and penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community  in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.

Grammatically, Burmese does not have noun declensions, or verbal inflections, so it has a more straightforward grammar than many European languages. It does however use many postpositions and auxiliary verbs that have important grammatical functions and associated shades of meaning. It signifies, let us have the courage to face it, a will to nothingness, a revulsion from life, a rebellion against the principle conditions of living. And yet, despite everything, it is and remains a will. Let me repeat, now that I have reached the end, what I said at the beginning: man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose…

Voltaire obtained the basis for his wealth more from a lucky lottery speculation in Paris, than from any of his writings. Serve Man was the club’s motto – and it slowly dawned on me what this meant. Yes, cannibalism was alive and well in London’s Pall Mall, it looked as if, while I should soon me dead, I should not be much buried – just stewed, with, I trusted, at least a fine garnish. Later that day they were successful in their cooperative hunting. Frightful caught a rat.

Yesterday Peter and I finally got down to our talk, which had already been put off for at least ten days. I explained everything about girls to him and didn’t hesitate to discuss the most intimate things. The evening ended by each giving the other a kiss, just about beside my mouth, it’s a really lovely feeling. He favored me with a contemptuous stare, “If I raised never a hand for that poor fool,” – pointing astern to the tiny sail – “d’ye think I’m hungerin’ for a broken head for a woman I never laid me eyes upon before this day?” I must do some algebra – Kitty. Goodnight.


“What’s rape?” I asked him that night. Atticus looked around from behind his paper. He was in his chair by the window. As we grew older, Jem and I thought it generous to allow Atticus thirty minutes to himself after supper. He sighed, and said rape was carnal knowledge of a female by force and without consent. According to the Afrikaners, white Christians are destined by God to remain apart and above all other races. Said one Afrikaner of the ideal of racial apartheid, “The more consistently the policy of apartness could be applied, the greater would be the security for the purity of our blood and the surer our unadulterated European racial survival.”

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