Tag: books

Quotes from Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Notes

One Lesson You Learn Reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

I like to describe The Old Man and the Sea as Ernest Hemingway’s Moby Dick. After all, it’s about an old man going after a giant fish. Am I right?

The first time I read it, I was in my early twenties. I didn’t like it much. The second time I read it, I was in my early thirties. I liked it a little better that time even though reading it was a little like eating sauceless boiled spaghetti – as is.

But there’s this one killer paragraph that I keep coming back to. This paragraph makes the whole novel worth reading. It will sneak inside your soul and slowly, very slowly, change you.

Actually, I opened the book today looking for this paragraph that I’m telling you about. It was like I needed to read it.

The paragraph says:

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

What do we learn from this?
Well, let me put it this way and motivate you as I simultaneously motivate myself:

Go after what you want.
Go after something big, something beautiful, something noble.
Go after it with all you have – mind, body, and spirit.
Do everything in your power.
And then, do everything in your power again.
Risk everything.
Do it.
When you inhale, it’s this dream that fills your lungs.
Do it.
It doesn’t matter if you come out of it a winner.
If you give it all you got, if you really give it all you got,
it’s all that matters.

As you chase your dreams, it’s okay to say, “You are killing me, fish.”
Because, like Charles Bukowski once put it, “Find what you love, and let it kill you.”
And as Samuel Beckett once put it, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Review of and quotes from Paul Virilio's The Aesthetics of Disappearance

A Compressed Review and Quotes from Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Paul Virilio’s ideas flow in The Aesthetics of Disappearance like rainwater in roadside channels. Raindrops (like ideas) come together in these channels and flow (like theories) towards an undisclosed final destination. There’s a (speed-)storm, but the roads are kept from flooding. Major thought systems are merely rinsed; they’re (disappointingly) left undamaged. Virilio’s picnolepsy, which is “the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed,” flows in roadside channels, proceeds through catch basins, travels through closed pipes, and where it ends up nobody knows… How do underdog theories survive? The book is read casually by a dilettante who remembers only this: the progressive increase in speed entails the progressive disappearance of consciousness. “For the picnoleptic, nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped.”

Quotes from Paul Virilo’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance

It’s our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

– Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Any man that seeks power isolates himself and tends naturally to exclude himself from the dimensions of the others, all techniques meant to unleash forces are techniques of disappearance.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

After the Vacation

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

After the vacation comes
the brain fog,
the arduous task to reaccept the status quo,
and the quicksand that gradually swallows you
back into the routine you escaped from.

Even though you’ve come back (refreshed) to conquer,
You’re procrastinating still, snoozing, postponing
the great battle.
The warrior’s armor waits for you in the closet.
Your heart still hasn’t synchronized with
the rhythm of the hammer striking the anvil.

But you must get up anyway.
So, you get up now.
You get out of bed.

There’s work to be done.

A cold shower,
then coffee.

You wear your armor.

The sun rises to meet a clear, blue sky
that appears to have never met dark, grey clouds.
But you remember the winter storms.
You remember every war you’ve won.

If God wills it,
you will win this one, too.

And when you’re done,
the boulder will rest on the top of the hill,
and it will never roll back down.