Aphorisms from the Madhouse

Aphorisms from the MadhouseMost of what a person calls 'myself' was installed by someone else. This book is 787 short entries working out what follows from that.The entries run one to three sentences. Each one is complete in itself. There is no chapter structure, no argument to track, and nothing that requires you to have read the page before.The method is compression. A position gets stated, then the second sentence takes something away from it.'Every relationship is conducted between estimates. The real ones remain unreachable, which is either tragedy or mercy depending on what they contain.''God-memes spread with viral patience. The idea of god outlives every god.'Religion gets treated as engineering rather than belief. Christ appears as a compressed archive. Paul appears as a vector. The question is never whether the doctrine is true but what it does to the nervous systems carrying it, and how long it keeps doing it after the founder is dust.The self gets the same treatment. It appears as a river named for the banks rather than the water, as an estimate other people hold, and as architecture that assembles itself out of whatever drifts through when nobody is choosing.Underneath both runs a practical question about time. You have one window of witness. The book keeps asking what you are spending it on, and it does not accept most of the usual answers.No consolation is offered. No agreement is requested. The book assumes you can take a sentence at full strength without being talked down from it first.Read straight through in an evening, or open it anywhere and get one line that costs you the rest of the afternoon.