The Topeka School Quotes

“The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." [Niels Bohr]”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“Nothing is a cliche when you’re living it.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence,”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." It either is or is not August...if I assert it's August when it isn't--simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed... [Niels Bohr]”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly;”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines.

Fortunately for Adam, this shifting of aggression to the domain of language was sanctioned by one of the practices the types had appropriated: after several hours of drinking, if no fight or noise complain had broken up the party, you were likely to encounter freestyling. In many ways, this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés. But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool. His luck was dizzying: that there was a rapid, ritualized poetic insult exchange bridging the gap between his Saturday afternoons in abandoned high schools and his Saturday nights in unsupervised houses, allowing him to transition from one contest to the other.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“But there are no grown-ups; that’s what you must grow up to know fully.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“could come to terms with aspects of my past without those terms being set by the Foundation’s unexamined Freudian tradition, which pathologized women’s experience when it didn’t fit the great man’s theory.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean? We had to pay a lot of money to get the tickets for the next day; luckily they still had seats, although I suppose there are usually seats to and from Kansas City.

It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“America is adolescence without end.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“part of me was trying not to react to my mom’s palpable concern about how much the meal would cost.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“Like any two men or man-children meeting in the playground or the marketplace they quickly, almost instantly, calculated who could take the other.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“easier to imagine starting a family where we were known only as a couple—no memory of Rachel, no complicated preexisting social networks, no potentially difficult relations nearby. I wanted children badly, maybe in part to mark how different my second marriage was from the first.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“I imagined this scene taking place simultaneously in kitchens all across suburbia, a vast performance of which the actors are unaware, directed by a mysterious force that goes by the name or misnomer of "culture”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“What could be lonelier than a child in space?”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“(The psychiatrists—Eric was among the youngest—often put these kids on Haldol; more than one came to me exhibiting, as a result of the mysterious pill, “tardive dyskinesia”—involuntarily sticking out their tongues, clenching and unclenching their jaws, smacking their lips.)”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“Then something happened in that space her silence made: my speech started to break down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non-sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me, or I guess what Palin or Trump sound like, delivering nonsense as if it made sense, were argument or information, although I was speaking much faster than politicians speak; my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded; it was like I was having a stroke.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“What I knew as much by instinct as by training was that when a boy like Jacob shows up in your cramped but light-filled office, you should not under any circumstances ask him to account for his behavior[...] Jacob would be the last person capable of such an account; if he had the language he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“The trauma was perpetual when you were left in it alone.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“one I had— The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“They felt at once profoundly numb and profoundly ecstatic to be young and inflicting optional damage on each other;”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

“It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real. And I think Sima was the first person to intuit the contours of this unknown knowledge that I carried; she helped me see that what was missing had a shape, was a piece of the puzzle of my personality, and she made the edges visible—how what I wouldn’t let myself know jutted out into other domains of my experience. And once its edges came into view, I could—in fact I could not not—confront the knowledge I’d both always and never had.”
― Ben Lerner, The Topeka School