Soundtrack to My Life 1

1.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law; and your worst enemies will be the members of your own family.”

- Matthew 10:34-36

2.

“Memories of the man the Princeps had once been were long since faded. As tales of the great war hero who had twice hauled the Republic back from ruin gathered dust, fresher stories told of Tiberius now had currency among his fellow citizens. No rumour of his perversities was so hideous that it could not be believed in Rome. That he had trained little boys to slip between his thighs as he went swimming and tease him with their licking; that he had put unweaned babies to the head of his penis, as though to a mother’s breast; even, most repellently of all, that he enjoyed cunnilingus. Yet beyond the streets and taverns of Rome, where slanders of the mighty, and mockery of their pretensions, had always bred, there were others who saw Tiberius in a very different light. In the provinces […] he had ended up widely admired as a prince of peace. ‘For wisdom and erudition,’ one declared flatly, ‘there is nobody of his generation to compare.’ Bloodstained pervert and philosopher-king: it took a man of rare paradox to end up being seen as both.”

- Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar (2015)

3.

“Aren’t all we adulterers amateur collagists? We’re scavengers and improvisers, constructing odd assemblages out of detritus and leftovers: a few scraps of time and some dormant emotions are stuck together to create something unforeseen, to have new experiences.”

- Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (2003)

4.

“No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a connection.”

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)

5.

“One of the most astounding productivity improvements during the nineteenth century had nothing to do with machinery but rather with the human capacity to perform agricultural labour with one’s hands. According to Edward Baptist, the daily amount of cotton that enslaved men or women picked increased 400 percent between the 1810s and the 1850s, owing to advances in the disciplinary technologies brought to bear on plantation management. Baptist proposes ‘torture’ as the most apt explanation for the new efficiencies of field labour. The violence of the lash, in the field and at the weighing house, pushed workers to ever greater feats of picking. Most notably, daily quotas were not determined by customary measurements (‘the task’) but were set individually, written on slate boards where they could be adjusted upward based on the previous day’s intake.”

- Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016)

6.

“You never thought that being grown up would mean having to be quite so – how can I put it? Quite so – grown up. Now did you? You didn’t think you’d have to work at it quite so hard. It’s so relentless, this being grown up, this having to be considered, poised, at home within a shifting four-dimensional matrix of Entirely Valid Considerations.”

- Will Self, My Idea of Fun (1993)