Dubbed an epic, one of 2024's best films, I had great expectations for The Brutalist. I thought it was about an actual Hungarian architect-immigrant, maybe a fictionalized Frank Gehry, who emigrated to the US in 1947 and became a world-famous architect. Gehry's life journey was similar to the fictional Lazslo Toth, though his parents emigrated from Poland to Canada in 1929 and on to the US. 

Man is certainly not born, but made man. (Erasmus)

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled. (Mark Twain)

Fixation exists across all levels of the biological hierarchy, from cells to behavior, and therefore constitutes a fundamental variable in all life. Fixations are an obsessive preoccupation with a single idea, impulse, or aim which interferes with normal behavior. In Freud, the id attaches to an object, leading to fetishism.

It is fundamental to human society; before capitalism as religious rituals, in our secular age, culminating in commodity fetishism, a fixation essential to capitalism, an economy defined by consumption. Where advertising is a form of behavioral conditioning, everybody will be perfectly pacified as long as their needs and wants are conflated in their own minds. No strife, no angst.

The most fundamental fixation of all is the male-female mutual sexual fixation,

This weighty tome by Andrew Solomon, "one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2012" according to the New York Times, is a fascinating read—chock full of gripping testimonials from a wide range of parents and their children, afflicted and/or blessed by their disabilities, describing how they struggled to adjust to the demands of society. At the same time, the author, a senior write for the NYT, has an agenda which on the surface looks quite innocent: to shape the reader’s view of disability towards greater tolerance of the ‘other’. A prominent liberal and gay public figure, his work is a kind of pinnacle of secular postmodernism, where everyone has a niche or slot, where all are equal and all lifestyles are equally valid, including families headed by 'two mommies', 'two daddies', or in the case of the author 'three mommies and two daddies'.

Jeffrey Kripal, How to think impossibly about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else, 2024.

People believe impossible things because impossible things happen to people. You don't need to believe any of the belief systems that build up around such extraordinary experiences to acknowledge that the experiences in fact happened.

If there is indeed truth to astrology, then I think it's axiomatic that we are wittingly or otherwise in touch with other 'universals', beings from the elite of all those trillions of stars around us. Impossible? Given our Cartesian thinking, yes. The unknown otherworldiness behind any such communication—and there is lots of evidence that something unknown and otherworldy is going on—requires impossible thinking.

Rumi: Come out of the circle of time into the circle of love.

I have taken up ping pong as my sole viable remaining sport in my 70s. It really was made for frustrated sedentary has-beens. I played real tennis till tennis elbow set in, but even the thought of lurching, run around asphalt (let alone falling) makes it easy to shift into a scaled-down version. The paddle weighs almost nothing, the ball nothing. You play for an hour without noticing the time. Unless you have bodily aches and pains making anything unpleasant. But even then, if they're not too serious, you don't notice the pain (e.g., sciatica) so much, you don't suffer.

From the start, I told Marty, 'let's not bother scoring. Let's just make every rally the best.'