Meditations
by
what the American philosopher Thomas Nagel terms “mortal questions�: the problems involved in making ethical choices, constructing a just society, responding to suffering and loss, and coming to terms with the prospect of death.


“It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. [...] And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is an implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. That is so untrue that it makes me want to cry--or laugh.”
― Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
― Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”
― Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
― Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

“It's all right,' she said. 'You couldn't help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed- so you were a good man just the same.”
― Jailbird
― Jailbird

“And contrast Mary Kathleen, if you will, with my wife Ruth, the Ophelia of the death camps, who believed that even the most intelligent human beings were so stupid that they could only make things worse by speaking their minds. It was thinkers, after all, who had set up the death camps. Setting up a death camp, with its railroad sidings and its around-the-clock crematoria, was not something a moron could do. Neither could a moron explain why a death camp was ultimately humane.”
― Jailbird
― Jailbird

“We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.”
― Jailbird
― Jailbird
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