“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.” — Jon Krakauer
(Source: shadowdays-are-over, via z-i-e)
“All great and precious things are lonely.” — John Steinbeck
(Source: relaximhilarious, via somebosleythatiusedjuno)
“
There’s a kind of fetishization of memory in our culture. Some of it comes from the experience and the memorial culture of the Holocaust—the injunction to remember. And it also comes from the strange collision of Freud and human rights thinking—the belief that anything that is not exposed and addressed and dealt with is festering and going to come back to destroy you. This is obviously not true. Memory is not such a cure-all. On the contrary, many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in large part in the name of memory. The difference between memory and grudge is not always clean. Memories can hold you back, they can be a terrible burden, even an illness. Yes, memory—hallowed memory—can be a kind of disease. That’s one of the reasons that in every culture we have memorial structures and memorial days, whether for personal grief or for collective historical traumas. Because you need to get on with life the rest of the time and not feel the past too badly. I’m not talking about letting memory go. The thing is to contain memory, and then, on those days, or in those places, you can turn on the tap and really touch and feel it. The idea is not oblivion or even denial of memory. It’s about not poisoning ourselves with memory.
So one of the things I’m interested in is how a measure of forgetting can also be helpful—societally or politically—in getting from a state of violent destruction to one of habitable coexistence. I’m not talking about reconciliation, whatever exactly that is. I mean a condition where you’ve reckoned with the demons adequately to hold them enough at bay that you can have security and act for the future instead of simply reacting to the past.
” — Philip Gourevitch[video]
(Source: ohh-fuck-theres-clowns, via coolstoryfuckface)
“The immediate effect of [the stunning rise in student debt in recent years] was to destroy much of what was most valuable in the college experience itself, which had once been the only four years of genuine freedom in an American’s life: a time to not only pursue truth, beauty, and understanding as values in themselves, but to experiment with different possibilities of life and existence. Now all of this was relentlessly subordinated to the logic of the market. Where once universities held themselves out as embodiments of the ancient ideal that the true purpose of wealth is to afford one the means and leisure to pursue knowledge and understanding of the world, now the only justification for knowledge was held to be to facilitate the pursuit of wealth. Those who insisted on treating college as anything but a calculated investment—those who, like my friend at the radical bookstore, had the temerity to wish to contribute to our understanding of the sensibilities of English Renaissance poetry despite an uncertain job market—were likely to do so at terrible personal costs.” — David Graeber, The Democracy Project
(Source: blunderbussmag)
Started my second watch through. I just love when he yells “Bullshit,” almost as much as when Maeby yells “Fuck” when she see the ostrich…
(Source: replayrelay)
[video]
[video]
The Breaking Bad return continues to gather steam. This time, Entertainment Weekly’s cover. All hail.
[video]
[video]
[video]
[video]