{"id":1872,"date":"2025-09-13T09:02:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T13:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/?p=1872"},"modified":"2025-09-23T14:36:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T18:36:14","slug":"against-the-inferno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/2025\/09\/13\/against-the-inferno\/","title":{"rendered":"Against the Inferno"},"content":{"rendered":"

Geoff Klock, English<\/h3>\n
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Author\u2019s personal image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Socrates, like Jesus and Lieutenant Columbo, dresses badly and appears at first glance to be unclear on the basics of what is going on or social mores or how to be a human being, but one of my favorite things about all three of them is that when they start talking they are playfully ironic and don\u2019t let you all the way in \u2014 they ask questions and tell stories and it\u2019s hard to know what they actually think, what they actually know, or what you are supposed to take away from what they just said, which is often a rambling story that doesn\u2019t seem to immediately relate to the situation they are in, or yours. Anyway. Here are a host of things other people have said that I have thought about on a regular basis in the nearly two decades since I started teaching at CUNY.<\/p>\n

David Foster Wallace: \u201cThere are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says \u2018Water\u2019s nice today\u2019 and the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes \u2018what the fuck is water.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Italo Calvino: \u201cThe inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alejandro Jodorowsky: \u201cBirds born in a cage think flying is an illness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicolas Malebranche: \u201cAttentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cormac McCarthy: \u201cHe said it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?\u201d<\/p>\n

Bertolt Brecht: \u201cWhat is the crime of robbing a bank compared to the crime of founding a bank?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nic Pizzolatto: \u201cLife\u2019s barely long enough to get good at one thing, so be careful what you get good at.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ingmar Bergman: \u201cI throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Victoria Chang: \u201cThere is a bird and a stone \/ in your body. Your job is not \/ to kill the bird with the stone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Percy Bridgman: \u201cCommon sense is something that tells us the world is flat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oscar Wilde: \u201cIt will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite impractical and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is impractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marcel Proust: \u201cAnything we have not had to elucidate ourselves, anything that was clear before we came along (logical ideas, for example), does not really belong to us, we don\u2019t even know if it\u2019s real.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Ruskin: \u201cThe greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw… Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walter Benjamin: \u201cIdeas are to objects as constellations are to stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles Schulz: \u201cCharlie Brown, I just saw the most unbelievable football game ever played! What a comeback! The home team was behind six-to-nothing with only three seconds to play, they had the ball on their own one-yard line, the quarterback took the ball, faded back behind his own goal posts and threw a perfect pass to the left end, who whirled away from four guys and ran all the way for a touchdown! The fans went wild! You should have seen them! People were jumping up and down and when they kicked the extra point, thousands of people ran out onto the field laughing and screaming! The fans and the players were so happy they were rolling on the ground and hugging each other and dancing and everything! It was fantastic!\u201d \u2014 \u201cHow did the other team feel?\u201d<\/p>\n

Frederich Nietzsche: \u201cLet us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others! We rarely change an individual, and if we should succeed for once, something may also have been accomplished, unnoticed: we may have been changed by him. Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet to come balances and outweighs his influence. Let us not contend in a direct fight \u2014 and that is what all reproaching, punishing, and attempts to improve others amount to. Let us rather raise ourselves that much higher. Let us color our own example ever more brilliantly. Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account, like all those who punish others and feel dissatisfied. Let us sooner step aside. Let us look away.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Baldwin: \u201cLove has never been a popular movement, and no one has ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you gotta to remember is what you are looking at is also you, everyone you are looking at is also you: you could be that person, you could be that monster, you could be that cop \u2014 and you have to decide in yourself not to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Buddhist story: \u201cThere\u2019s a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse and everybody in the village says \u2018how wonderful the boy got a horse\u2019 and the Zen master says \u2018we\u2019ll see.\u2019 Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says \u2018how terrible\u2019 and the Zen master says \u2018we\u2019ll see.\u2019 Then a war breaks out and the young men have to go off and fight and die except the boy can\u2019t go cause his legs are all messed up and everybody in the village says \u2018how wonderful\u2019 and the Zen master says \u2018we\u2019ll see\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Christian Parable: \u201cA man once was invited to visit both heaven and hell. First he went to hell where the tormented souls were sitting at tables laden with food, yet they were starving and howling with hunger. Each had a spoon but the spoons were so long they couldn\u2019t get them into their mouths. In heaven to his amazement the man found the souls of the blessed sitting at similar tables laden with food but they were all fed and contented. Each had a spoon and the spoons were just as long as the spoons in hell but they were all able to eat all they needed because they were feeding each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Max Barry: \u201cThese chimps, they\u2019re in a cage and the scientists toss in a banana on a stick. The chimps try to grab it but as soon as they do the scientists electrify the floor, so all the chimps get a shock. This goes on until the chimps learn that touching a banana equals electric shock. Then the scientists take one chimp out and put in a new one. This chimp, when he goes to grab the banana, he gets beaten up by all the others, because they don\u2019t want to get shocked. The scientists keep switching chimps one at a time until none of the originals are left. Then they add one more. The new chimp, he goes for the banana and the others jump him same as before. But none of them were ever shocked. They don\u2019t know why they\u2019re doing it. They just know that\u2019s the way they do things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Desmond Tutu: \u201cThere comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and see why they\u2019re falling in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert M. Pirsig: \u201c[A church] had been sold and was being used as a bar. A number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike Primavera: \u201cThe Purpose of a System is What It Does\u201d: \u201cMy neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he\u2019s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying.\u201d<\/p>\n

William Blake: \u201cThe worship of god is the worship of his gifts in other men\u201d<\/p>\n

Carl Sagan: \u201cWhat an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Franz Kafka: \u201cA book should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ralph Waldo Emerson: \u201cAt West Point, Col. Buford, the chief engineer, pounded with a hammer on the trunnion of a cannon, until he broke them off. He fired a piece of ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, until it burst. Now which stroke broke the trunnion? Every stroke. Which blast burst the piece? Every blast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Terry Pratchet: \u201cYou\u2019re saying humans need fantasies to make life bearable?\u201d \u2014 \u201cReally, as if it was some kind of pink pill? No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.\u201d \u2014 \u201cTooth fairies?\u201d \u2014 \u201cYes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.\u201d \u2014 \u201cSo we can believe the big ones?\u201d \u2014 \u201cYes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.\u201d \u2014 \u201cThey\u2019re not the same at all!\u201d \u2014 \u201cYou think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michelangelo: \u201cWhat\u2019s important about a sculpture is what\u2019s left after you roll it down a hill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gilles Deleuze: \u201cWhen someone asks \u201cwhat\u2019s the use of philosophy?\u201d the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Branson Reese: \u201cIf you make something popular enough eventually you will die or sell it off and a person in thick rimmed glasses whose main artistic vision is that he loves to have meetings will take it and sandblast it until it is nothing. Maybe every franchise should collapse into a version of itself that makes shareholders nod and shake each other\u2019s hands. We should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don\u2019t dream can\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jenny Slate: \u201cInformation about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on. That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it you learn new things about the original thing\u201d<\/p>\n

The Prestige:<\/em> \u201cYou never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It\u2019s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, can make them wonder, and then you \u2026 then you got to see something really special. You really don\u2019t know? It was \u2026 it was the look on their faces\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Futurama:<\/em> \u201cBeing God isn\u2019t easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.\u201d \u2014 \u201cOr a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money.\u201d \u2014 \u201cYes, if you make it look like an electrical thing. When you do things right, people won\u2019t be sure you\u2019ve done anything at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Geoff Klock, English<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3579,"featured_media":1878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"coauthors":[12],"class_list":{"0":"post-1872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fall-2025","8":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1872"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2021,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions\/2021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/inquirer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}