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I read Genesis three years ago and could not understand God’s displeasure when Eve and Adam chose to know good and evil—chose to be Godlike. That should have been his proudest hour.”
“Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us—it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry.
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“Of course no single mind can know more than a fraction of past, present and future existence. But what you call mysteries I call ignorances, and nothing we do not know (whatever we call it) is more holy, sacred and wonderful than the things we know—the things we are! The loving kindness of people is what creates and supports us, keeps our society running and lets us move freely in it.”
Love (Wedder thinks) only deserves the name when men insert their middle footless leg.
I think it was the smell which wakened me. This place (just like the zoo) stank of despair, and fearful hope, also of stale obsession which seemed a mixture of the first two stinks.
Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly,
Again he begged to be joined onto me in “wholly wedlock”. Wholly wedlock! Ugh. The joys of wedding cannot be locked up, not even partly, nor can his nipple-noddle remember I must marry someone else.
Folk who moved money fast were rich or poor, or turning quickly into rich or poor:
The spinning wheel and little rattling ball ground something down in those who bet and watched, and they were pleased to feel it ground away because it was so precious that they loathed it, and loved to see others destroy it too.
He called it freedom, for that makes men feel to blame for what they do. Men hate that feeling, so want it crushed and killed. I am no man. To me the place stank like a Roman game where tortured minds, not bodies were the show.
“People who care nothing for their country’s stories and songs,” he said, “are like people without a past—without a memory—they are half people.”
“How long can the poor soul keep going like this?”
for the Russian alphabet is Greek to me,
we are like teachers in a playground of children who do not want to know that the school exists. Why is it our duty to teach them? I will tell you.
Oh YIKES
their smaller skulls prevent it.
Eugenics
Baxter sighed and in a steady, uninflected voice told me, “They say, no no no no no no no no no, help blind baby, poor little girl help help both, trampled no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no where my daughter, no help for blind babies poor little girls I am glad I bit Mr. Astley.”
Being overcome with despair at the realization and thought of omnipresent suffering.
From now onward these blend the spiritual insights of an oriental sage with the analytical acuteness of David Hume and Adam Smith.
He says cruelty to the helpless will never end because the healthy live by trampling these down.
Sociological need for the poor and destitute. Conflict-theory approach
Jesus was as maddened by all-over cruelty and coldness as I am.
“What would Jesus have done for them if he could NOT have made them see?” I asked. “Would he have hurried past like a bad Samaritan?”
Harry is bad because he enjoys how cruelly folk act and suffer, wants to persuade me bad is needed. If he succeeds he will have made me bad too. I listen to him because I need to know all he knows. He is as honest as God and teaches facts God never taught—all the things I must change, so had better note down.
Harry is giving the serpent tempting Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge: Needing Bella to know all of the bad and suffering i.e. Good v Evil
public ornaments and private pleasure parks
joys of motherhood are closed to them,
supposed to be superior to the animal pleasure of breast-feeding—supposed to be superior to the sexual act itself—yet all the time they are as much parasites, prisoners and playthings as odalisques in a Turkish harem.
You will be my slave in law, but not in fact.”
How romantic
They then send them to schools where they suffer if they do not disguise their thoughts and feelings and are taught to admire killers and stealers like Achilles and Ulysses, William the Conqueror and Henry the Eighth. This prepares them for life in a land where rich people use acts of parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods,
“I will search as long as I live rather than be a childish fool or selfish optimist or equally selfish cynic,” I told him, “and I will make my husband a searcher too.”
“Big nations are created by successful plundering raids, and since most history is written by friends of the conquerors history usually suggests that the plundered were improved by their loss and should be grateful for it.
Poverty, hunger and disease may drive some people to steal loaves from bakeries and dream of revolutions, but make revolutions less likely by weakening the bodies of the desperately poor and keeping down their number through infant mortalities.
Instead of curing the factors, let them run rampant to keep the oppressed too weak and disorganized to fight back
military barracks beside every industrial city, a strong police-force, huge new jails; also poor-houses where children are divided from parents and husbands from wives—places so deliberately grim that people with a spark of self-respect spend their last few pennies on cheap gin and die of exposure in ditches rather than enter them.
Sounds like Reaganism
Modern industry finds it cheaper to hire hands for days or weeks—when not needed they are free to beg work from other masters. When many free men are begging for work the masters are free to lower wages.”
"freedom" but all through the lens of capitalism and subsequent subjugation
FREE TRADE—“Yes,
Where it all went wrong
He knows that when I can bear no more I run to the end of the ship and lean over the rail so that the wind blows my screams and wails out to sea.
This genuinely feels like the culmination of pulling the wool from your eyes, layer by crusted layer as an adult with a formal "plunderer" narrative education. The more you uncover, learn, & peice together, the more gut wrenching and heart shattering it is. I have screamed those screams, I have wailed those wails. Bell is getting a crash course in what some of us have hadto learn ourselves, and whatmany of us have had to endure personally or generationally.
“Yes, hooray. The other world-improvers say that groups who come to power by violence always perpetuate themselves by more of it and become a new tyranny. I agree.
What we've seen of Communist gov't and therefore believe communism to be carte blanche
“The VIOLENT ANARCHISTS or TERRORISTS dislike those who want power as much as those who have it. Since every other class depends on those who work the land, the mines, the factories and transport, they say such workers should keep what they make to themselves—should ignore money and exchange things by barter—should use explosives to frighten off folk who will not join them yet try to boss them.” “So they should!” I shouted.
What she said
the police and army are better terrorists than anyone else.
State funded terrorists
Prince Kropotkin, Count Leo Tolstoï and an American bachelor farmer-author called Thoreau.
To read
One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.
“Hoist with my own petard ha ha ha ha ha.”
Foiled by your own foolishness
inherited intelligence and wealth set them above everyone else. The crowd of beggars represented the jealous and incompetent majority, who were kept in their place by the whips of those on the ground between: the latter represented policemen and functionaries who keep society as it is.
How puritanical (destined stations and outcomes)
who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.
Your heart is too good for this wicked world, my dear. You need advice from a friendly, experienced woman you can trust.”
But this Wedderburn is obviously an over-sucked orange. You will be a far better wife to your husband if you now enjoy some variety.”
HAHAHAHA
especially for the miserable ones, as Victor Hugo calls them,
Lés Miserablés
Our café is mostly frequented by revolutionary hôteliers who say the rich will only disgorge through a bouleversement of the structure totale.
Change will only come through a violent upheavel of the entire structure: total revolution
The cause was my own ignorance. Will I ever reach the end of it?
Tbhe horrors persist
tête à tête
A private convo between two people
tout de suite
Immediately
Professor Charcot.
A true historic figure. Called the Founder of modern neurology. First time he is mentioned in the book, so a little confused at the connection at first. I guess it is to further mire our story in the history and figures of the time, to make it more credible as the author is presenting this as history and not a work of ficfion.
Duc de Germantes
Leader of Sprouting literal french translation. O think it would be the Duke of Germany though
