Michael > Recent Status Updates

"In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead."

"We lived together for some years, and I think we most fully understood each other when once I tried to kill him with a kitchen knife."

"Sometimes I wondered if Harry could remember what the truth was or would have recognized it if he heard it."

The chapter here about Charles Fletcher Lummis will likely be one of my favorite and one of the most emotionally compelling.

"Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory."

"Destroying those books is a way of saying that the culture no longer exists; it's history has disappeared; the continuity of it's past and it's future ruptured. Taking books away from culture is to take away it's shared memory."

"He didn't have much purchase on the life he was trying to create in L.A. He hovered between what he didn't want anymore and what he wasn't very likely to have."

The author's love of libraries and books shines through in the first 20 or so pages. I suspect this will be a quick read.

The author's love of libraries and books shines through in the first 20 or so pages. I suspect this will be a quick read.

"He’d never been able to answer her questions. There were no answers, only questions. That was the only thing he’d learned in life. It wasn’t much, but it was more certain than believing in God."

“There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”

"In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."

"We can define man only in relation to his commitments."

"First, what do we mean by anguish? Existentialist like to say man is in anguish. This is what they mean: a man who commits himself, and who realizes that he is not only the individual that he chooses to be, but also a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be, cannot help but be aware of his full and profound responsibility."

"If I am a worker and I choose to join a Christian trade Union rather to become a communist...I choose to signify that the kingdom of man is not on this earth. I choose to signify that resignation i, after all, the most suitable solution for man... I am choosing to be resigned on behalf of all." Sartre's criticism of Christianity.

Choosing to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all."

"Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It declares that, if God does
not exist, there is at least a being whose existence precedes essence, a being who exists before
the power to be defined by any concept and that this being is, as Heidegger has said, human
reality."

"Those who find solace in the wisdom of the people - which is a sad, depressing thing - find us even sadder"

Sartre on the public's viewpoint of existentialism "It is public knowledge that the fundamental reproach brought against us (existentialists) is that we stress the dark side of human life."

"But when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something,but that it is a moral imperative that we have it,then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there."

"But when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something,but that it is a moral imperative that we have it,then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there."

"You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness."

"Lucille wanted to see the world" her father would say in retrospect "and I guess she found out"