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"Why do boats have names, but not airplanes?" I asked the chauffeur. "Why just Flight 971 or Flight 326, and not the Bellflower or the Daisy?"
"Probably because there're more planes than boats. Mass production."
"I wonder. Lots of boats are mass-produced, and they may outnumber planes."
"Still ... ," said the chauffeur, then nothing for a few seconds. "Realistically speaking, nobody's going to put names on each and every city bus."
"I think it'd be wonderful if each city bus had a name," said my girlfriend.
"But wouldn't that lead to passengers choosing the buses they want to ride? To go from Shinjuku to Sendagaya, say, they'd ride the Antelope but not the Mule."
"How about it?" I asked my girlfriend.
"For sure, I'd think twice about riding the Mule," she said.
"But hey, think about the poor driver of the Mule," the chauffeur spoke up for drivers everywhere. "The Mule's driver isn't to blame."
"Well put," said I.
"Maybe," said she, "but I'd still ride the Antelope."
"Well there you are," said the chauffeur. "That's just how it'd be. Names on ships are familiar from times before mass production. In principle, it amounts to the same thing as naming horses. So that airplanes treated like horses are actually given names too. There's the Spirit of St. Louis and the Enola Gay. We're looking at a full-fledged conscious identification."
"Which is to say that life is the basic concept here."
"Exactly."
"And that purpose, as such, is but a secondary element in naming."
"Exactly. For purpose alone, numbers are enough. Witness the treatment of the Jews at Auschwitz."
"Fine so far," I said. "So let's say that the basis of naming is this act of conscious identification with living things. Why then do train stations and parks and baseball stadiums have names, if they're not living?"
"Why? Because it'd be chaos if stations didn't have names."
"No, we're not talking on the purposive level. I'd like you to explain it to me in principle."
The chauffeur gave this serious thought. He failed to notice that the traffic light had turned green. The camper van behind us honked its horn to the overture of The Magnificent Seven.
"Because they're not interchangeable, I suppose. For instance, there's only one Shinjuku Station and you can't just replace it with Shibuya Station. This non-interchangeability is to say that they're not mass-produced. Are we clear on these two points?"
"Sure would be fun to have Shinjuku Station in Ekoda, though," said my girlfriend.
"If Shinjuku Station were in Ekoda, it would be Ekoda Station," countered the chauffeur.
"But it'd still have the Odakyu Line attached," she said.
"Back to the original line of discussion," I said. "If stations were interchangeable, what would that mean? If, for instance, all national railway stations were mass-produced fold-up type buildings and Shinjuku Station and Tokyo Station were absolutely interchangeable?"
"Simple enough. If it's in Shinjuku, it'd be Shinjuku Station; if it's in Tokyo, it'd be Tokyo Station."
"So what we're talking about here is not the name of a physical object, but the name of a function. A role. Isn't that purpose?"
The chauffeur fell silent. Only this time he didn't stay silent for very long.
"You know what I think?" said the chauffeur. "I think maybe we ought to cast a warmer eye on the subject."
"Meaning?"
"I mean towns and parks and streets and stations and ball fields and movie theaters all have names, right? They are all given names in compensation for their fixity on the earth."
A new theory.
"Well," said I, "suppose I utterly obliterated my consciousness and became totally fixed, would I merit a fancy name?"
The chauffeur glanced at my face in the rearview mirror. A suspicious look, as if I were laying some trap. "Fixed?"
"Say I froze in place, or something. Like, Sleeping Beauty."
"But you already have a name."
"Right you are," I said. "I nearly forgot."

~ Haruki Murakami, "A Wild Sheep Chase"

... to say a bed is a thing to sleep on is like saying the sea is a drop of salty water. Below the cotton quilting lay a hidden world. Wooden braces keep the mattress from collapsing. Inner springs coil when pressure is applied, twanging each time we shift in our sleep or flail to find the ideal position, searching for the lost aquatic comfort we knew long ago in our mother's womb. However tame or acrobatic, sex takes its toil on the foam padding, lust grinding it down to powder, the grains sifting earthward night after night. Microscopic colonies of mites wait for the falling manna of our skin. Dreams sweep across the surface like seasons. Fever and night sweats drench the sheets. A bed is a lectern, a pedestal, an altar, a rack, a boxing ring, a cavern of blankets, a spotlit stage, a trampoline, a nest, a grave.

~ Bernard Cooper, "The Bill from My Father"

The realization that one is growing older comes to most of us, if we're lucky, in bearable increments; that way, the full cargo of mortality doesn't sink the boat, so to speak, but is brought on board in the form of manageable hand luggage. One year you develop an almost erotic fondness for the warmth of a hot water bottle tucked between cold sheets; next, you and your friends develop an entire dinner conversation to the benefits of dietary fiber and, less appetisingly, its effects.

~ Bernard Cooper, "The Bill from My Father"

If there were a way to put an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their own end -- who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down the pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose their features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be any trouble. The only matter they cannot take care of is the body they leave behind, the mound of flesh that, after a day or two, will begin to stink. If only it were possible, if only it were permitted, they would take a taxi to the crematorium, set themselves down before the fatal door, swallow their dose, then before consciousness dwindles press the button that will precipitate them into the flames and allow them to emerge on the other side as nothing but a shovelful of ash, almost weightless.

Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life -- to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this -- is the opposite of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make. The reason that Schulz's early sorrows look like "sources" of his later brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to find humor in them. Almost every young person experiences sorrow. What's distinctive about Schulz's childhood is not his suffering but the fact that he loved comics from an early age, was gifted at drawing, and had the undivided attention of two loving parents.

~ Jonathan Franzen, "Two Ponies" from "The Discomfort Zone"

Every teacher at his school, man or woman, has a cane and is at liberty to use it. Each of these canes has a personality, a character, which is known to the boys and talked about endlessly. In a spirit of knowing connoisseurship the boys weigh up the characters of the canes and the quality of the pain they give, compare the arm and wrist techniques of the teachers who wield them. No one mentions the shame of being called out and made to bend and being beaten on one's backside.

Without experience of his own, he cannot take part in these conversations. Nevertheless, he knows that pain is not the most important consideration. If the other boys can bear the pain, then so can he, whose willpower is so much greater. What he will not be able to endure will be the shame. So bad will be the shame, he fears, so daunting, that he will hold tight to his desk and refuse to come when he is called out. And that will be a greater shame: it will set him apart, and set the other boys against him too. If it ever happens that he is called out to be beaten, there will be so humiliating a scene that he will never again be able to go back to school; in the end there will be no way out but to kill himself.

So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against beaten, it is all the same, he will die.

The strange thing is, it will only take one beating to break the spell of terror that has him in his grip. He is well aware of this: if, somehow, he can be rushed through the beating before he has time to turn to stone and resist, if the violation of his body can be achieved quickly, by force, he will be able to come out on the other side a normal boy, able to join easily in discussion of the teachers and their canes and the various grades and flavours of pain they inflict. But by himself he cannot leap that barrier.

~ J.M. Coetzee, "Boyhood - Scenes from Provincial Life"

John Cook, fishing guide, Montana
"I often think about how I would want to die. My own father recently died a slow death of lung disease. He lost control over his own life, and his last year was painful. I don't want to die that way. It may seem cold-blooded, but here is my fantasy of how I would die if I had my choice. In my fantasy, Pat would die before me. That's because, when we got married, I promised to love, honor, and take care of her, and if she died first, I would know that I had fulfilled my promise. Also, I have no life insurance to support her, so it would be hard if she outlived me. After Pat died -- my fantasy continues -- I would turn over the deed of my house to my son Cody, then I would go trout-fishing every day as long as I was physically in condition to do it. When I became no longer capable of fishing, I would get hold of a large supply of morphine and go off a long way into the woods. I would pick some remote place where nobody would ever find my body, and from which I could enjoy an especially beautiful view. I'd lie down facing that view and -- take my morphine. That would be the best way to die: dying in the way that I chose, with the last sight I see being a view of Montana as I want to remember it."

~ Jared Diamond, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed"

Self-reliant, each loner swims alone through a social world -- a world of teams, troops and groups -- that scorns and misunderstands those who stand apart. Loners are accused of being crazy, cold, stuck-up, standoffish, selfish, sad, bad, secretive and lonely -- and, of course, serial killers. Loners, however, know better than anyone how to entertain themselves -- and how to contemplate and create. Thay have a knack for imagination, concentration, inner discipline, and invention -- a talent of not being bored. (But) too often, loners buy into the society's messages and strive to change, making themselves miserable in the process by hiding their true nature -- and hiding from it.

Loners bristle at being advertised to. We might not mean to bristle, might not even see the bristle, but what else would loners do at being told to buy not just objects but lots of objects, and for dubious reasons -- because others buy them, because someone who is being paid to say so says so? Objects doomed to rapid obsolescence. Objects whose shimmer onscreen and in magazines is the exact same kind that loners see in the real world and realize is false, is cheap, is there only to trick the stupid and will disappoint. We know this on some level when the cheese melts on the pizza ad, but sudden hunger lunges out of nowhere and plucks our guts, too. We know we do not need a car, nasal spray, lipstick, life insurance, or at least not the specific brand or color being waved in front of us. How dare you tell me what to do? And yet we want.

Advertising is antithetical to the loner mentality. Yet it is masterful. It makes us clench. It turns us into accidental rebels: suffering the ache and labor of resisting strong-arm tactics, shunning the attractive, the seductive, the lavishly marketed. Reisting ads, insisting on buying what we want when we want and if we want, is radical. And failing to resist makes us feel, deep down, even just a bit, like Judas.

Time spent alone has a way of winnowing the inventory of what we need. It reveals that some of our best delights derive from the intangible -- from actions, experiences, thoughts -- rather than objects. Not every loner is a miser or minimalist, but to decrease contact with others is to decrease the number of items that seem necessary ... Desiring and requiring stuff means casting your lot with others. Intrinsically we know this. Being a rebel is tiring. Especially when you are up against a great hypnotic army that looks lke Naomi Campbell and whose battle cries are so catchy that you cannot get them out of your head.


Meeting anyone at all is not a loner's long suit. Meeting an assembly line of maybes has as much appeal as severe sunburn. Opening lines, small talk, seem repulsive -- and we haven't even mentioned pursuit. Spending any time even with those we know, even with old friends, can grate. For loners, spending time with strangers, again and again, and a stream of strangers, not merely to get over with but to discern whether someday you will put your tongue inside this person's mouth, is the definition of surreal. All this reality has little bearing on what outsiders presume. Prejudiced minds think in extremes, imagining that all loners want to be all alone at all times ... "loner" is not a synonym for "misanthrope." Nor is it one for "hermit," "celibate," or "outcast." It's just that we are very selective. Verrry selective.

~ Anneli Rufus, "Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto"

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary -- of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that has no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?

~ Jonathan Franzen, "The Corrections"

(I really, really like this idea of negative polarity ...)

I have to admit, I am rather keen on keeping other people at arm's length. If a chap stands an inch behind me and loudly crunches and slurps an apple, I suffer and moan and clench all the clenchable parts of my anatomy, but what I really want to do (please don't tell anybody) is to turn around on the spot with fists raised, and with an efficient, clean one-two, knock all his teeth out. What I would really appreciate is a kind of negative polarity I could switch on in personal-space emergencies; in fact, now I think of it, is there any lovelier, more comforting four-word combination than "Activate the force field"? All my life, I seem to have seen wonderful, battery-draining force fields demonstrated in science-fiction movies, but let me tell you: if you try to buy one, you draw a blank. You can't even get an automatic apple-atomiser that will detect inappropriate propinquitous apple-consumption, blow the fruit to smithereens and deliver a mild incidental electric shock to the genitals. No, personal space is still an ideal rather than a solid reality off which bullets would bounce and swords glance. the best mental picture I can come up with for personal space as we know it is a spherical membrane eight feet in diameter with a person inside it, bowling along like a hamster in a ball.

~ Lynne Truss, "Talk to the Hand"

A philosopher ... or even your average human being ... might consider it stultifying to sit in a cube farm all day saying "Hello, and thank you for calling the Problem Resolution Center ..." then patiently listening to the user's complaint, then suggesting the obvious solution, then waiting for the next user's call. But often when I was at work, feeling relaxed and unfree, overqualified and airconditioned, it seemed to me that the plight of the low-level corporate drone was unfairly maligned by believers in social justice and human potential. It is true that the pay was low, the benefits nonexistent, the question of upward mobility moot, and the institutional neglect of our hidden talents virtually complete. But what a tremendous, almost vegetal peacefulness there was ... ! At night I might feel bad about colluding with my mediocrity -- but somehow while seated before my terminal as I swiveled back and forth in my standard-issue office chair, I felt that if I just kept working, with due diligence, at this time-serving American job that after all someone had to do, then whatever happened to me or my country wouldn't be my fault.

~ Benjamin Kunkel, "Indecision"

... if there was anything consistent with the way she raised us, it was in her refusal to allow any of us to indulge in self-pity of any kind. She achieved this through a maddening style of argument, in which the following three statements were repeated in various sequences:

A. It's your life + social commentary.
B. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.
C. No one ever said that life was fair.

For example, an argument I had with her when I was eleven:

"I want to go out for the football team," I said. " ... all my friends are playing."

"It's your life," she answered." But I don't want to be responsible for you hobbling around on crutches your whole life because you blew out your knee as a kid. And besides, we don't have the money for it."

"But I want to."

"What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things."

"That's not fair. You always say that."

She shrugged. "No one ever said that life was fair."

I paused, trying another approach.

"I won't get hurt, if that's what you're worried about."

She looked me over. "Someone your size? You'd definitely get hurt. I've seen football players. You'd be nothing more than a bug on the windshield to them. You're too small."

She had a point there. I was small.

"I wish I was bigger. Like my friends are."

She put a consoling hand on my shoulder. "Oh sweetie, no one ever said that life was fair."

"I know, but still ..."

"Just remember this, okay?" she'd offer, her voice softening with maternal affection. "It'll help you later in life when you're disappointed about anything. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things."

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I should try another sport."

My mom would smile tenderly, as if finally conceding the argument. "Hey, do what you want. It's your life."

The older I get, the more I hated these arguments, because I lost every one of them. But still, deep down, I could never escape the feeling that my mom was probably right about most things. After all, she spoke from experience.

~ Nicholas Sparks, "Three Weeks with My Brother"

Your last name stays put. The garage is all yours. Wedding plans take care of themselves. Chocolate is just another snack. You can be President. You can never be pregnant. You can wear a white T-shirt to a water parka. You can wear NO shirt to a water parka. Car mechanics tell you the truth.

The world is your urinal. You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky. You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt. Same work, more pay. Wrinkles add character. Wedding dress $5000. Tux rental-$100. People never stare at your chest when you're talking to them. The occasional well-rendered belch is practically expected. New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet. One mood all the time. Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat. You know stuff about tanks.

A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase. You can open all your own jars. You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness. If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend. Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack. Three pairs of shoes are more than enough. You almost never have strap problems in public. You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.

Everything on your face stays its original color. The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades. You only have to shave your face and neck. You can play with toys all your life. Your belly usually hides your big hips. One wallet and one pair of shoes one color for all seasons. You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look. You can "do" your nails with a pocket knife. You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache. You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December 24 in 25 minutes.

No wonder men are happier.

What Crake had to say was this: "Homo sapiens ... is one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck."
"How do you account for that?" said Jimmy.
"Imagination," said Crake. "Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds - in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever."
"As a species we're doomed by hope, then?"
"You could call it hope. That, or desperation."
"But we're doomed without hope, as well," said Jimmy.
"Only as individuals," said Crake cheerfully.

~ Margaret Atwood, "Oryx and Crake"

... the fact is that there is one extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly.

For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumble and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn't terribly ambitious.

~ Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

When I was young, 50 seemed like a very big number. I once believed I'd never live a long life and that my future would be different. But now I am right in the middle of my own future, and I have not found any real change in myself. My dream is as far as it was during my childhood. The only difference is that I have already lost my plan to realize it.

~ Wang Shuo

- What do you think faith is?
- Faith is the belief in something that can't be proven to exist.
- And why don't you have it?
- I think God is something People use to avoid reality. I think faith allows People to reject what is in front of our eyes, which is that this thing, this life, this existence, this consciousness, or whatever word you want to use for it, is all we have, and all we'll ever have. I think People have faith because they want to need to believe in something, whatever that something is, because life can be hard and depressing and brutal if you don't.
- You may be right, but what about accepting the idea that faith can make your life better. I know my faith makes my life better, and whether what I believe in exists or not, because I have faith in it, I get the benefits of that faith ... You can't prove love or friendship exist, but you still have faith in them. I'm asking you to apply the same principle to someething greater than yourself.
- I can feel love and friendship. I can see and touch and talk to the People I love and the People I choose to make my friends. The idea of God doesn't make me feel anything and I can't see God or touch God or talk to God.
- Have you ever tried to open yourself up to the idea of faith? ... I want you to stop intellectualizing it and try to open yourself to it.
- I've never believed in God, not even as a little Kid. I'm not going to start now.

~ James Frey, " A Million Little Pieces"

Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success; every goal I set myself, every recognition I craved made anything I actually did seem paltry by comparison, and whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood.

~ Bernhard Schlink, "The Reader"

One is often told it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told, I have not noticed it ...

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward dimunition of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world ...

My own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar; and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they become able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any other.

~ Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not A Christian"
taken from Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven"