The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Caroline Bird

“There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and […] car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.”

— Ada Limón, excerpt of “The Quiet Machine”, in Bright Dead Things

remember being ten and future plans were so far away? and now you have one foot into that future and nothing seems to be right and all you want is to step back but the past keeps crumbling as soon as it's made. there's no going back, there's nothing to go back to.

Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson

The Beetle in the Box

AKA The Private Language Argument:

In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, he proposed a thought experiment that challenged the way we look at introspection and how it informs the language we use to describe sensations. 

For the thought experiment, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a group of individuals, each of whom has a box containing something called a “beetle.” No one can see into anyone else’s box. Everyone is asked to describe their beetle — but each person only knows their own beetle. [And] each person can only talk about their own beetle, as there might be different things in each person’s box. Consequently, Wittgenstein says the subsequent descriptions cannot have a part in the “language game.” Over time, people will talk about what is in their boxes, but the word “beetle” simply ends up meaning “that thing that is in a person’s box.”

Why is this bizarre thought experiment disturbing? The mental experiment points out that the beetle is like our minds, and that we can’t know exactly what it is like in another individual’s mind. We can’t know exactly what other people are experiencing, or the uniqueness of their perspective. It’s an issue that’s very much related to the so-called hard problem of consciousness and the phenomenon of qualia.

Read 8 more Philosophical Thought Experiments That Will Keep You Up at Night via io9

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“Conversation should touch everything, but concentrate itself on nothing.” – Oscar Wilde

u know what makes me cry..... that one van gogh quote about life changing for the better..... “many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. and it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘what do i care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ yes, evil often seems to surpass good. but then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. one morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. and so i must still have hope.” yeah..... Crying....

A Little Life (Hanya Yanigahara)/ Dandelion Wine (Ray Bradbury)/ Souvenir (boygenius)/ Self-Portrait Agianst Red Wallpaper (Richard Siken)