From Philip Roth's American Pastoral
"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to sat, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the game generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that--well, lucky you."
From The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky):
"It's a good thing there's not much suffering," he observed, "when the head flies off."
"You know what?" the prince picked up hotly, "You've just observed that and everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that. But a thought occurred to me then: what if it's even worse? To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination even a thought like that can pop into your head. Think: if there's torture, for instance, then there's suddering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die. And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in then minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second--your soul will fly out of your body and you'll no longer be a man, and it's for certain--the main thing is that it's for certain. When you put your head under that knife and hear it come screeching down on you, that one quarter of a second is the most horrible of all. Do you know that this isn't my fantasy, but that many people have said so? I believe it so much that I'll tell you my outright. To kill for killing is an immeasurably greater punichment than the crime itself. To be killed by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than to be killed by robbers. A man killed by robbers, stabbed at night, in the forest or however, certainly still hopes he'll be saved till the very last minute. There have been examples when a man's throat has already been cut, and he still hopes, or flees, or pleads. But here all this last hope, which makes it ten times easier to die, is taken away for certain; here there's the sentence, and the whole torment lies in the certainty that there's no escape, and there's no greater torment in the world than that. Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle and shoot at him, and he'll still keep hoping, but read that same soldier a sentence for certain, and he'll lose his mind or start weeping. Who ever said human nature could bear it without going mad? Why such an ugly, vain, unnecessary violation? Maybe there's a man who has had the sentence read to him, has been allowed to suffer and has then been told, 'Go, you are forgiven.' That man might be able to tell us something. Christ spoke of this suffering and horror. No, you can't treat a man like that!"
(Dostoevsky was actually sentenced to die and then pardoned while standing before the firing squad.)
"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to sat, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the game generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that--well, lucky you."
From The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky):
"It's a good thing there's not much suffering," he observed, "when the head flies off."
"You know what?" the prince picked up hotly, "You've just observed that and everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that. But a thought occurred to me then: what if it's even worse? To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination even a thought like that can pop into your head. Think: if there's torture, for instance, then there's suddering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die. And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in then minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second--your soul will fly out of your body and you'll no longer be a man, and it's for certain--the main thing is that it's for certain. When you put your head under that knife and hear it come screeching down on you, that one quarter of a second is the most horrible of all. Do you know that this isn't my fantasy, but that many people have said so? I believe it so much that I'll tell you my outright. To kill for killing is an immeasurably greater punichment than the crime itself. To be killed by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than to be killed by robbers. A man killed by robbers, stabbed at night, in the forest or however, certainly still hopes he'll be saved till the very last minute. There have been examples when a man's throat has already been cut, and he still hopes, or flees, or pleads. But here all this last hope, which makes it ten times easier to die, is taken away for certain; here there's the sentence, and the whole torment lies in the certainty that there's no escape, and there's no greater torment in the world than that. Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle and shoot at him, and he'll still keep hoping, but read that same soldier a sentence for certain, and he'll lose his mind or start weeping. Who ever said human nature could bear it without going mad? Why such an ugly, vain, unnecessary violation? Maybe there's a man who has had the sentence read to him, has been allowed to suffer and has then been told, 'Go, you are forgiven.' That man might be able to tell us something. Christ spoke of this suffering and horror. No, you can't treat a man like that!"
(Dostoevsky was actually sentenced to die and then pardoned while standing before the firing squad.)
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I've known plenty of people who conduct arguments in this manner. They misconstrue their opponent's argument, turning it into a convenient man-of-straw argument. Some people will argue for an hour or more seemingly without listening to a word that their opponent is saying. I am sure that some people do this deliberately for no better reason than that they love the sound of their own voice.
xoxo