English - Author | September 26, 1961 -
Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.
Will Self
FuturePastMadnessStatisticsImage
Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator.
MeSmallStartWake UpViolenceUp
You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.
DeathI AmMeBelieveYouParty
As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.
SayingUncomfortableDiscrimination
Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.
HistoryGreatMadnessYouFind
Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
MadnessSometimesOthersAbsence
Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?
GoodFreeThinkMoodNamesTell
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
GreatImaginationHorizonLiberty
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
WorkKindActorWellOtherCostumes
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
StoryThinkShortHumanCapacity
The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.
FutureTravelPastShadowMeEvents
It would seem that I, who never could make much sense of physics when I was at school, have now gained a strong sense of Einsteinian space-time. I am free of the nimbyism of now, and feel a strong kinship with both the dead and the unborn.
SchoolI AmFreeStrongPhysicsNow
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