To look back. Lacking power, ‘nothing’ watches.
the activities of the human mind but nothing is new.
Trees are like clothes, they . . . No. From the point of a pen things stand for a time. As long as one goes on with it, going on being eventually to forget what one started out to do. I think of soap, alone, no use, for no reason in the world I can tell. Secrets are locked up everywhere in procedure. Tell me the time and I’ll tell you an unkempt joke. The hours are like clouds, their coming and going directions obvious. But, as far as I can tell, writing, like its poor cousin speech, has no beginning.
Practical Jokes. Always play practical jokes when going on a picnic with ladies.
Reason does not joke, and men of reason do not; a prophet, in whom the moral sentiment predominates, or a philosopher, in whom the love of truth predominates, these do not joke, but they bring the standard, the ideal whole, exposing all actual defect; and hence the best of all jokes is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding from the philosopher’s point of view. There is no joke so true and deep in actual life as when some pure idealist goes up and down among the institutions of society, attended by a man who knows the world, and who, sympathizing with the philosopher’s scrutiny, sympathizes also with the confusion and indignation of the detected, skulking institutions. His perception of disparity, his eye wandering perpetually from the rule to the crooked, lying, thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with laughter.
This is the radical joke of life and then of literature. The presence of the ideal of right and of truth in all action makes the yawning delinquencies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the interest, but droll to the intellect.
My mother’s sending us a dirty joke in the mail.
He’s on the rag now because he took too many pinkies.
you kill a blue elephant?
an onion with a jackass?
Filler. Nostalgia filler. Shelve inconsequential nostalgia filler.
Failure. Shelve inconsequential go-go. Americana go-go. Failure.
Failure. Tourist Cabin. Joke hoax brands in joke Icebox. Failure.
and was asked to live at Walden on his own.
Hark! There’s laughter! These fight and draw nearer, we—fight and draw apart. They know the things they say are true bothways, we miss the joke—try to—Oh, try to. Let it go at that. There again! Real laughter. At least we have each other in the ring of that music. “He saved a little then had to go and die.” But isn’t it the same with all of us? Not at all. Some laugh and laugh, with little grey eyes looking out through the chinks but not brown eyes rolled up in a full roar. One can’t have everything.
Going along an illworn dirt road on the outskirts of a mill town one Sunday afternoon two lovers who have quarreled hear the loud cursing and shouts of drunken laborers and their women, followed by loud laughter and wish that their bodies were two fluids in the same vessel. Then they fall to twitting each other on the many ways of laughing.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.
provided you don’t get too ornry.
. . sponte et ex certa scienta . . . to Enricho de Aquabello.
That was a good joke you played on the other guests.
The spring, though mild, is incredibly wet.
All alone in the skittish darkness.
and with these subtleties remunerate you.
incommodious cycle, pests of poets.