NONSENSE


The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library. They speak of the “feverish Library whose chance volumes affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.” In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all orthographical variations, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. Solitary, infinite, useless, incorruptible, secret, the Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.

-- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel ”

OLD

However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying – in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way – but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extra-terrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.  

-- Donald Hall
                                       


PESSIMISM

There is immense unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and incompleteness in the human lot, the modern world denies us the possibility of consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame for having stubbornly failed to make more of our lives.

-- Alain de Botton