The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

catechism lessons, that the body is made of the same stuff as the soul was inversely correct: the soul is the tenderest part of the meat. To stifle the boy’s abstractedness the Prediger had only to give his dreams a good whipping.

      The conversion of flesh into tumor helps one cope with spirituality.

      To boil down the subtle ideas of the great books into diazepam and inject it into my veins. Instead of the gradual toxic buildup of detail by time and effort, a lethal dose of the elusiveness of enlightenment.

      To take advantage of clarity before it grows into suprasensual understanding, one has only to think a pleasant thought.

      One who distributes just actions like falling leaves but is niggardly with his affections, practicing all the hard virtues for want of capacity for the easy ones—who does not love—avoids the misfortunes of both the stampeded shepherd and the cuckolded rooster. Authoritarian figures are best suited to raise a vegetable farm, practicing bloodletting on beets and spanking the earth with a hoe.

      Glancing both towards the orient and the occident, the universal mind is a cross-eyed half-breed.

      There are no defeats in philosophy, only advances and withdrawals . . . until the shore erodes.

      The most commonly shared trait among natural-born Americans is cheeseburger-concentrate in the placenta. America is a likeness discovered later, inside a fast food embassy.

      Thieves break even as long as they lose both hands.

      Charlatans of superiority crave the adulation of those they despise, dismissing private thoughts as a reward for molding their own to public opinion.

      If only snow would fall up, so Heaven’s “good souls” might warm themselves . . .

      The admirable emotions hackneyed by kitsch, those touched by the muse distance themselves from sentimentality by delineating the sideshow fervors instead. Instead of renovating the tabernacle of love to enchant more discriminating congregants, they build a fetish academy.

      The Kyoto School: of all philosophy’s pollinators, the only ones who did more than send a bee over the fence.

      Hard to occupy a middle rank in society and be without illusions. Such people were only raised high enough to set an example for those above them.

      Every idea has been theorized before by someone who didn’t phrase it more memorably.

      Like Saturn at a family reunion, we ravenously devour children, parents, cousins—all which threatens the integrity of the self, which renders it less than completely unique. Even the babysitter must go: the remunerated memories, especially, must be consumed.

      In a telecommunications age the most efficient response is still the messenger’s head.

      Until the nineteenth century there was no need for a hedonistic calculus—the suffering principle was the universal measure of the human condition. In the twenty-first century there is no possibility of one—the gauge burst in the twentieth.

      Absent, absinthe: my artificial intoxications deprived of lucidity, I resort to spasming a clear and distinct delirium.

      “Real-world” piety: for the professional laity even salvation is just another material ambition. Communion-goers, looking to double their transubstantiation, drink the blood of Jesus to micturate the gold of the magi.

      So many stories devoted to redeeming our sympathy for bad men, not nearly enough showing the greater irresponsibility of good ones.

      The overture to Napoleon’s downfall was not the 1812 campaign, but the 1796 sentimental novella.

      Embracing a leper, marrying into Down syndrome—loving without beauty to take refuge in would be love’s bottomless substantiation, were not our flaws present to deny us purity even here. The tender mercies melt us through dirtiness . . .

      “Politically correct” is the diplomatic way of describing the opponent’s position.

      My only friends are philosophers no one has heard of. Less a waste of intimacy than to know philosophers everyone summarizes.

      The fraudulent wits: it takes an amiable humor to brighten partial truths into boundless possibilities, exposing the totality of error that had always been hidden there.

      No message in a bottle will ever find a shore if it can’t be put into a daily news bulletin. Unless a man sings from his soul’s catalogue of radio hits, he will end up like Schubert—a corpse stuffed with unheard lieder.

      Widely quoted in essays and articles, my reputation will not be secure until I receive mention in suicide notes. A Werthervane.

      Bones and organs: the ossuary decorates its walls with what surrounds our souls so the toccata can howl through them unobstructed.

      Universal sainthood is a potluck where the congregation brings stale wafers, the hermits bring moldy manna, and no one is allowed to vomit.

      The father of nations is Abraham, expatriates Isaac, citizens the ram.

      It’s a waste feeling love’s weightlessness if you don’t tell your lover why you’ll have to be scraped off the pavement.

      Man is a card sharp with a two of clubs up his sleeve.

      Part 2

Nightcaps

      My Cat

      I have named my pleasure, and this pleasure I call “my cat.” My cat chases rats around as they appear from holes in the wall. Its large green eyes are visible through even the darkness as it fixes its gaze upon its objects. It startles the subjects of its gaze at first, but initial fear becomes the driving force behind a rising sense of awe as the large unrelenting eyes fill them with a feeling of confidence. “This creature,” the rats say, “should have its way with me.”

      My cat is quick and agile and I can never seem to lay my hands on it and train it to obey. It didn’t take long to think up this name, “cat,” but the question remains whether I own it, whether it is my pet name. Not because it doesn’t rightly fit me, but because it is too solitary to belong to me. Myself a solitary being, I sympathize with our common natures, and yet we are opposed in our mutual nobility. It is too selfish to be subdued by me, and I am too proud to do anything but let it run rampant. Chasing my cat like it does its rats demonstrates to others both that it is out of control—I am too clumsy and slow to catch it—and that I am just a poor imitation of my name, that I am not the real thing. The quality of my cat that bedevils me, that renders me powerless to conquer it—its elusiveness—is also the source of my respect for it. As I wear this name longer, I come to forget that I ever had any other name—that I ever could have any but this one.

      More Is a Faster Lessening

      Everyone praises the endurance of the ascetic, but no one appreciates the stamina of the hedonist. To laugh until the throat burns and smoke a cigar to soothe it, to black out but not pass out, to suspend love’s climax, to be immortal in the moment—what Stoic has such fortitude: to die upon the seizure and slump of orgasm? The sunrise is an unappealing reprise of “business as usual.” Only the stoic loves the morning light; he needs no promise to realize the protestant work ethic: life itself is full of good purpose enough. Prolonging desires well past the point of the modest effort it would take to fulfill them, self-deniers tremble from the tectonic shifts of suppressed impulses. They put their drives in park and suffer motion sickness. But the Heroin Heroine is a nocturnal creature: she knows all too well that nature is “red in tooth and claw”—her leopard jacket is stained with wine. She purifies the red inside her with the white, diluting blood with opioid milk. Survival is ancillary; it serves a higher purpose, and is relinquished before it is scurried after.

      Where are the hagiographies of the great hedonists? The story of the old flaccid saint who, filled with the spirit in his nether-region, miraculously deflowered a hundred virgins? The example of the desert monastic who wandered upon a vineyard oasis and imbibed his weight in wine? After asceticism’s preparation for mystical grace one must adopt a method proper to its reception. Catholicism awaits the