Chirbes about writing as a form of self-inflicted violence:

I feel like copying out Cicero’s entire paragraph on wine, simply for the pleasure of doing so: it is so beautifully written. It possesses that kind of harmony that only a well-ordered mind can impart to writing. The words seem to flow effortlessly, creating an illusion of ease for the reader, as if writing were an activity as natural as breathing, rather than the painstaking construction of an artifice demanding a significant degree of self-imposed violence. The order and precision of writing arise from an unnatural exercise, from an inhuman mental discipline, just as dance or song relies on the display of that same violence inflicted upon the body’s limbs and organs.

—Rafael Chirbes, Diarios

This is a reminder that if you’re writing and it’s painful, that’s fine. It’s supposed to be painful. You’re trying to extract order out of chaos, like a sculptor who tortures a chunk of marble to drag a beautiful form out of it. You’re wrestling meaning out of a jumble of words.

Biden had trans people wave their hormone-grown naked breasts at the camera in the White House. Any outrage about the wrestling match or the biker show organized by Trump in front of the White House sounds utterly ridiculous after that.

It’s like people keep having their brains reset every morning so that there is space for the new official message. Biden had Dylan Mulvaney traipse all over the WH and pose for videos. The time to discuss the history-hallowed dignity of the building was back then.

It’s also quite entertaining that people who are engaging in paroxysms of outrage over the wrestling match are so unaware of the class dimensions of their reaction. Wrestlers and bikers are prole-coded, while naked trans drag queens are aristo-coded. Hence, to them  wrestlers are disgusting, while trans poseurs are elevated and refined.

I am not going to post the footage of the 21-year-old woman who was thrown off a 40-meter bridge in Brazil by bungee jump workers who “forgot” to attach her safety rope. The poor kid died, and it’s a terrible tragedy.

The way it was filmed and the way the camera immediately goes to the rope, which is pooled on the ground, make me think that this was not an accident. That the young woman did not attempt to check whether the safety rope was attached, that she somehow managed not to know that she was not being secured, makes me suspect that she was drugged or unconscious.

This being Brazil means nobody is going to investigate, but the situation reeks of being engineered. There are a lot of sickos who pay for videos of gruesome situations and staged assaults or murders.

I deeply dislike the expression “peak woke.” It suggests that the heights of wokestry are behind us. We can now look at them as a quaint memory from the past and share a chuckle over them.

None of that is true. Not only have we not reached a peak, we haven’t even gotten anything but the smallest taste. People are complacent, although there is zero evidence that the organizers and the participants of the ideological wave that hit us in the year 2020 have changed their minds or even mellowed out a bit.

I made vegetable soup today:

– Carrots
– Potatoes
– Cabbage
– Purple asparagus
– Bok choy
– Garlic scapes
– Fresh corn
– Spinach and parsley.

It’s lovely, which is precisely the problem. A large pot is already two-thirds gone.

This is the curse of people who cook well.

As many other writers, Chirbes always felt that the art he created hadn’t really been authored by him:

I have the impression that someone other than myself has written things that are beyond my reach—things I would be incapable of writing. It is the work of someone smarter than I am, someone who writes the way I can only ever hope to; these texts seem to hang there in the literary chain, appearing distant and elusive to me: they are not mine, and that is precisely why they interest me.

I also believe that humans are conduits for beauty. The source doesn’t lie within us. It can go through us. It can reflect itself in us, but it doesn’t originate in us.

Why some people get chosen to be conduits is not for us to understand. It doesn’t mean it’s easy for them, though. It’s an enormous responsibility to receive the message correctly and transmit it well. The 2,200 pages of Chirbes’s diaries make it very clear that this work is anything but easy.

If you don’t want to do it, if you don’t gain an intense amount of energy from social interactions, then you’re simply not an extrovert. Extroverts gain energy from social interactions. Introverts lose energy through social interactions. This doesn’t mean that extroverts are necessarily good at socializing or that introverts are bad at it. Neither way of being is morally superior to the other one.

People increasingly try to turn things that are physiological into a morality play. It’s bizarre. In the meantime, things that actually do lie in the moral sphere are extracted from it by appeals to individual choice. Many people sincerely believe that something that just happens to you and you cannot choose speaks to your moral character when things that you choose freely do not.

Exhibit number five trillion to demonstrate that analogies are almost invariably dumb:

To dig under all the verbiage, in the depths of the formless or deformed mass of clichés, to find true words, words that name rather than merely envelop. That is the writer’s job: to clean the grime that clings to language.

-Rafael Chirbes, Diarios.

I don’t hate AI. What I hate is when AI is used for purposes for which it should not be used. Knives are great, but not for sticking into people. That kind of thing.

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, and mind you, this is very recent, from yesterday :

People sincerely believe this, and that is a disaster, both for the education system and for society.

By the way, this was the foundational belief of Soviet pedagogy. My mother was told by the Soviet authorities that the only reason why her students, almost all of whom were children of convicts and multi-generational alcoholics, were not proficient in algebra is that she was a bad teacher. That this kind of errant lunacy is still so widely believed in America is simply sad.