Peter A. Hempel - Quotes & Observations

What do we want?

We want landscapes,

And mountains to climb,

And cliffs we can fall from.

Random quotes & observations

I judge, therefore I am.

Like every decent person, I abhor hypocrisy on the part of others. Mine own hypocrisy is different – it is gentler, kinder, and a helpmeet to me in my days.

There are moments when I find myself in situations I could not have imagined myself in. I start wanting to scream, “Hey, there’s been a terrible mistake! I’m in the wrong movie here! Usherrr! I’m supposed to be in the movie down the hall: ‘Life with Father: The Movie.’” But of course, this is my movie. It has no title, and the plot most of the time isn’t too terrific, despite the funny and the sad moments. Black comedy is fun to watch, but once you’re in the movie, some of the joy wears thin.

That’s probably not a good idea, but let’s face it, good ideas are soooo boring.

Nothing says chemistry like a trail of clothes on the way to the bedroom.

Yes, you’re unique. So is everyone else. That doesn’t make you special. Unique is free. Special you have to work for.

Life would be easier with more compromise – but it would be far less worth living. I have always been too unable to compromise. For me there are too few midpoints. When I am not an atheist, I am out in a revival tent somewhere, on a hot summer night, preaching hell and damnation, and babbling in tongues, and waving snakes and drinking battery acid to show how much I love the Lord.

Even Beaver Cleaver picks up an Uzi sometime.

“You don’t have to be Radar O’Reilly to hear the choppers coming.”

Richard Nixon and I share our birthday, and I have always seen his refusal to give up, even with multiple stakes through his heart, as a good quality and a positive sign for me.

One of the difficult questions for space travelers is, when you are headed for a new and unknown destination, how far in advance do you announce your arrival – or do you not announce it at all and simply see what happens? Academic space journals are filled with theoretical discussions of ethics and cultures and options – captains’ logs are filled with stories of what actually happened.

My apartment building in Washington (Arlington, actually) was a very solid affair, thick concrete everywhere – floors, walls, ceilings. It was utterly soundproof. No footstep noises overhead, no musical intrusions from a neighbor’s party. You could take a chainsaw to someone in your apartment, and no one would hear a thing. If you scream in a soundproof apartment, do you really make a noise?

When a guy wants to go take a leak, he can announce in a loud voice to everyone at the table, “Got to go drain the lizard.”

But you never hear a woman talking about needing to “Go drain the clam.”

(Women tinkle, men whiz.)

I have lived and I have read, and believe me, reading is better.

Writing is not typing, though this is often a difficult distinction to make clear to non-writers.

Man is not a rational animal, man is a rationalizing animal.

The Writer’s Conundrum

No writing is ever perfect. There are choices between good ways and bad ways to say something; between good ways and better ways to say something; and between good ways and equally good different ways to say something. 

To me, literature is essentially religious, and the whole of literature operates as a kind of open-ended Bible. Literature offers us models of man in the universe, with his attempts, his achievements, his failures and suffering, and the unending awareness of death and concomitant sense of futility that mocks his progress into consciousness.

A stint of unemployment/freelancing after Planned Parenthood gave me a grim taste of life utterly without economic structure or security. It was highly enlightening, and utterly terrifying; I still view the world very differently as a result. It’s money that creates the wallpaper of smiles and deference you find in stores and in your dealings with most of the necessities of life. Any hint that you don’t have any and the smiles fade, and even social friendships become perilous; you feel people’s nervous need to keep a clear distance from your plight and your needs. It’s a raw view of the universe, but a true one, and I became indelibly conscious of the insulation and privilege we usually enjoy, and the all too short distance between that and a real fall.

Someone once made a distinction between those who regarded life as something to be understood (the academic predilection?), and those who saw it as an adventure to be lived. That, perhaps, has been the essence of the conflict I have found within myself – between my academic/intellectual self and the side of me that demands something else – danger, risk, a path not bounded by good intentions. I heard a cartoon character on one of the kids’ T.V. shows comment one day: “I want an adventure. But I want it to be safe and easy.” Yeah, that’s what I want too.

Over the past years, I have done a fair bit of reading in sociobiology – Desmond Morris, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, David Barash, Robert Wright, Jared Diamond – a field I find very interesting. I suspect that there are a lot of drives, like aggression, which are not easily put aside; at best we can hope for ways to keep the tensions between them and our desire for order and for “nice” in balance. One of the books pointed out that those who are most adamantly against war are essentially arguing for the freezing in of the status quo; it’s nice if you’re already part of the advanced world, but perhaps not quite as nice for everyone else who will be left to trust in your magnanimity.

Quotes from stories

“Remember that whole thing they teach about drama equals conflict? Two people fucking isn’t drama. It can be fun, it can be exercise, sometimes it can even feel like love, but it’s not drama. But a guy fucking someone else’s wife and worrying that the husband is going to come home and catch him, that’s exciting. Or the woman who finds out her husband was cheating and goes off and finds some random guy to fuck as a revenge cheat? That’s pretty interesting. Or simply anyone feeling guilty about any kind of sex they’re having or want to have. Watching them freak out and identifying with their freak-out is what makes it sexy. A fuck is just sex, but a head-fuck is art.”

“Victoria”

“I began to realize that I was, at heart, an American in my soul. I was, whatever setbacks faced me or even faced the country, an optimist. Things were good, and when bad things happened, they would pass. But I also realized that that was not the Russian way. There was some kind of darkness, some sense of bad history, some sense that things were only going to get worse in different ways, not better. And that your best hope was to survive, however tragically.”

“The Snows of Dr. Zhivago,” (Ron Ehrs)

Ronald Reagan used to love telling his audiences, “The most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” He was wrong. There is no more terrifying phrase for a guy to hear from a girl than “We need to talk.” You don’t know for sure what’s coming, but you know damn well it’s not going to be good. It’s like Room 101 in the movie 1984, where you had no idea what was in there, all you knew was that it was going to be the worst thing in the world.

“Six Degrees” (Ron Ehrs)

“I live in a single room in a house off campus. I mean it would be pretty neat if I had a girlfriend, since I have a lot of privacy, but since I don’t, I just have a lot of privacy.”

“Six Degrees” (Ron Ehrs)

"You know how when you hear the word 'pussy,' you think of something warm and furry – you know, like covered with a nice soft bush. You can pet it and it purrs. Take the bush away, and you have something completely different, something alien and freakish. You know, what the hell is that? The warm and friendly 'pussy' morphs into pure, ravenous 'cunt.' "

"Sole Sister" (Ron Ehrs)

Doctoral dissertation quotes

“In this vale of tears, it is temptingly easy to conclude that our too-brief life is but a cruel irony, a lingering death sentence with no hope and little consolation.”

(Peter A. Hempel, doctoral dissertation [1975])

A central question for Albee is whether man’s “high moral principles” are merely ethical frosting atop the savage beast or whether they are, in the final analysis, man’s most “practical” morality. In considering morality, we are better off equating the terms “low” and “high” not with “bad” and “good,” but with the poles of self-interest and social interest.

(Peter A. Hempel, doctoral dissertation)

If high moral principles are to have survival value, they must be more than ethical frosting atop the savage beast. (PAH – 04-27-20)

Butler soon leads Julian into a semantic maze of models and replicas that adds confusion to the tension. Julian refuses to become entangled in Butler’s “trap,” but this kind of “Jesuitical” sophistry does suggest that logical gymnastics can be brought to entertain any proposition, and that reason is a poor test of truth.

(discussion of Albee’s Tiny Alice,

Peter A. Hempel, doctoral dissertation [1975])

Religion is allied to man’s emotional nature, offering answers to the fears that beset him. If so, Julian’s insistence on “truth” may be largely misguided; in the face of the ugly reality of death are we not perhaps better off creating the defiant lie of God? The suspicion emerges, then, that beneath all the masks, the ominous “secret” is that the “true God” is not life, but death, and that the doctrines of religion are in reality the propaganda of death. If the fear of death is the first step on the road to madness, can we not perhaps persuade or even delude ourselves into a “love” of that which we can never understand and rarely “accept”? Man is a creature of life, however painful or uncertain; the “mercy” of death is rarely appealing, even in the most extreme circumstances. The paradoxical task of man’s religion, then, is to create a “religion of life” which is in fact an argument “for” death, to “seduce” man out of his dread and into an acceptance of his inevitable fate.

If there is, in fact, no “redeemer” or “salvation,” then life itself is but the spawning ground of death, and the end of sex lies not in the cradle but in the grave. In this sense, then, both sex and religion are the servants of death even as they help perpetuate life. If we look back through the play for a moment, we can see a series of images leading up to this scene. Was [the youthful and beautiful] Miss Alice’s introductory [aged] mask not in fact the true face of God, her “opening gambit” an appropriate memento mori? Miss Alice’s youthful allure is, for Julian at least, no more than a fleeting illusion before the eternity of death. The discussion of spiders, of course, suggests the idea of the black widow, an ironic image of the links among sex, marriage and death that are to come. In this context, even the D.H. Lawrence “love” poem becomes an ominous piece of “death propaganda”; as the woman “drown[s] against” her dark and silent lover, she finds in sex an equation that makes “death good.”

Religion, of course, must attempt to provide a similar equation. Lawrence’s woman finds sexual ecstasy as she abandons herself to the “little death” of orgasm; similarly, the religious martyr seeks a religious ecstasy in a final abandonment of self in real death. In the struggle against death, of course, no man is a “civilian” and there are no survivors; religious martyrs may, however, in choosing death and embracing it joyously, serve as kamikaze pilots in man’s battle against despair. And if God is Death, suicide indeed becomes an act of homage and love, while religion glorifies the slaughter. The ironic links among God, sex and death are continued in Julian’s story of the “Virgin Mary” at the asylum, whose “divine” implantation was not Christ but cancer, and in Julian’s fantasies of sexy martyrdom. Is Miss Alice perhaps a vampire, whose “rejuvenation” for Julian is an ironic foreshadowing of the blood he will shed to sustain her? Certainly the “bloodbath to immortality” looks more like the breakfast of death than the will of a concerned and helpful deity.

(Peter A. Hempel, doctoral dissertation [1975])

Age and birthdays

He tried to hold on to the idea – the hope – that age was something we could negotiate with. We could offer to do this, or eat that, or meditate, and age would agree to wait, to hold off, to stop with the surprises. He would read articles about a constant flow of scientific discoveries – hairless voles that did not age, single-cell organisms that were as old as life itself. There were tech-bros and scientists who proclaimed that age, and even death, were aberrations, and that a few more discoveries and refinements and breakthroughs in research would catapult us into immortality on earth – but, as was obvious, only for those whose decay had not yet become – as his surely had – irreversible.

Age may be just a number. But, as I grow older, it is a number I am definitely not comfortable with.

With birthdays, the bigger the number, the more depressing it is.

At some point, maybe in your late 50s, maybe sometime in your 60s, you begin to notice a certain slowing down, a slight decline. You may not like it, but you think of it as merely an inconvenience. You don’t yet realize this hint is the first notice in your death sentence.

The Birthday Paradox

You remember Xeno’s Paradox, that an arrow can never actually hit its target since before it gets there it has to go half the distance, and then half of the remaining distance and so on, so that however close it gets it’s still half of that last distance away from the target. I think I may have discovered the birthday paradox: however old you get, your life expectancy will increase. At this rate, I should be able to plan on living forever.

Death, as they say, is a blunt instrument. Death is not justice. Nobody goes to heaven. There are no different kinds of hell. Whatever precedes it – surrounded by family, the sounds and screams of battle, enhanced interrogation, the sustained agony of aggressive disease, the lonely walk into the woods with a shotgun – one moment you are there and then you’re not. Not anywhere. Not anything.

Believe me, when it gets medical, it gets real. [from The Contract – A Novel, by P.A. Hempel]

“When you marry ‘til death do you part,’ one of you is marrying a corpse.” [01/05/22]

The 9s are “countdown” years. When you turn 29, for example, you are no longer truly in your twenties, you are counting down the days until you turn 30 and leave your twenties, with all their promise, behind. Rather than being in the final year of your twenties, you become a “pre-thirty,” waiting for that final shoe to drop. And, of course, each “9” becomes more ominous and fraught than the one before – than all the ones before. And in each of the ever-dwindling span of days and hours, you are called into judgment – what have you done with this decade and in how many ways have you fallen short?

Once the actual day arrives, it has happened, it is done. And from there you simply march along, no single day being individually more significant than any other, until of course you reach the first day of your next 9.

When you hit a “9”, you become a “pre-”; at 39, you become a pre-40, and so on, in increasingly depressing order.

As he went through the morning paper, he checked the headlines and articles of interest. He would also check the obits, a habit he had adopted in recent years. As he had exited his 60s and had entered the bleaker landscape of his 70’s, the obits had emerged as a kind of scorecard of life. Age was the money-shot, joined closely by cause of death.

Each birthday is more lethal than the one before

My birthday is in January; normally, the cut-off for entering school is in October or November and I would’ve had to wait until the following year to start school, but somehow the school let me start “early.” As a result, other than people who had skipped a grade, I was typically the youngest person in the classroom. In part, it offered a bit of a psychological buffer, in that if I was doing less well than someone else, some of it we surely due to my being younger, although I was smart enough that that wasn’t a major issue. But it was certainly a comfortable excuse to live with.

Now that I am much, much older, I am most likely to be the oldest person in the room, with no excuse whatsoever. Count me very unhappy about this development.

Memento mori

“As you grow older, you trade all that you might have been for what you are. All the things you might have done for what you did. Your potential hollows out, year by year, until whatever it is that you are, is left.”