Цитаты из книги The Dice Man

Друзья мои мужчины, внимание. Бывают вопросы, которые требуют любого ответа, кроме колебания. «Ты меня любишь?», например, не является вопросом, а выступает как стимул в последовательности «стимул — отклик»: «Ты меня любишь?» — «О моя дорогая, да». Вопрос «Ты спал с ней?» требует немедленного ответа «да» или «нет»: уклончивость подразумевает вину. Вопрос «Ты экспериментировал с другими женщинами?» требовал немедленного ответа «Да, конечно, солнышко, и это сделало меня ближе к тебе, чем когда-либо». После чего последовали бы слезы, пощечины, брань, отдаление и в конце концов любопытство и примирение. Колебание же, с другой стороны…

•If you haven’t lived the life of the dice, you haven’t lived at all

•In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God, and Chance was God

•I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

•life seemed to get more boring. Admittedly I was cheerfully, even gaily bored, where before I had been depressedly bored, but life remained essentially uninteresting. My mood of happy boredom was theoretically preferable to my desire to rape and kill, but personally speaking, not much.

•If I played with two dice the subtleties in probability were much greater. Two principles I always took care to follow. First: never include an option I might be unwilling to fulfill; second: always begin to fulfill the option without thought

•If you remember that for four years I had been acting like a saint, understanding, forgiving and accepting; that I had been repressing every normal reactive impulse, you can imagine the joy with which I responded to calling my patients idiots, bastards and latent cretins

•’Oh no, no, I'd never want to do anything to hurt her. She seems such a lovely person.'

'She is, which makes her all the more rapable.’

•I'd like to hear what you'd like to do if you could recreate the world to suit your own ... highest dreams.

•I've sat here for four weeks telling you about my stupid, cruel, promiscuous, senseless behavior and you sit back there nodding away like a puppet and agreeing with everything I say.

•I tended to restrict my options so that my colleagues wouldn't begin to suspect that I was into anything slightly unorthodox

•I was killing past pride in myself as analyst, as article writer, as good-looking male, as loving husband, but every corpse was fed to the cannibalistic ego of that superhuman creature I felt I was becoming. How proud I am of being the Dice Man!

•We trap ourselves in routines to avoid confronting new risks; over time, this leads to boredom as life becomes stagnant and predictable

•I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - is only illusory events created to justify an illusory stagnant present

•To change man, the audience by which he judges mself must be changed. A man is defined by his audi-nce: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed. Major psychological disturb-ances, 'identity crises,' are caused when an individual begins to change the audience for whom he plays

•To destroy the single dominant personality one must be capable of developing many personalities

•We all have minority impulses which are stifled by the normal personality and rarely break free into action. Desires are forbidden and stopped by your sense of yourself. The minority impulses have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded

•You'll learn more about yourself and life in one month than you have in all your previous twenty-five years.

•she had repressed the whole spiritual side of herself: she was as ashamed of having to pray in front of me as would be most other people of having to perform soixante-neuf at the communion rail

*** He feels liberated when he realizes that his horrible problems are not his to worry about any longer: they’ve been shifted to the square shoulders of the dice. He becomes ecstatic. He experiences the transfer of control from an illusory self to the dice as a conversion or as salvation. It’s something like newly born Christians giving up their souls to Christ or God, or the Zen student or Taoist surrendering to the Tao. In all these cases the ego-control game is abandoned and the student surrenders to a force which is experienced as being outside himself.

*** No, sir, I regret to say I’m serious. Every society is based upon lies. Our society is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, sinle-lie society absorbed a single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, uncontradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.

The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors and TV set that his beliefs are not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method to drive him insane.

*** Freedom, Reader, is an awful thing: so Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Albert Camus, and dictators throughout the world continually tell us.

*** If a man overcomes what he calls sinfulness by his own willpower, he increases his ego-pride, which, according to the Bible, is the very foundation of sin. Only when sin is overcome by some external force does the man realize his own insignificance, only then is pride eliminated. As long as you strive as an individual self for the good, you will either have failure – and an accompanying guilt – or pride, which is simply the basic form of evil. Guilt or pride: those are the gifts of self. The only salvation lies in having faith.

*** A mental hospital is a total institution: it engulfs each patient with a consistency of rule, habit and attitude which effectively isolates him from the more unpredictable problems of life in the outside world. A patient can adjust successfully to hospital life because he can count on its limiting its horrors to certain predictable patterns. The outside world holds no such hope for him. He is thus often able to adjust to hospital life and yet be frightened footless by the thought of having to live. We have effectively prepared our patients to live adequately in the mental hospital and no place else.

*** From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.

Эпиграф:

The torch of chaos and doubt - this is what the sage steers by.

- Chuang Tzu

Это перевод Б. Уотсона. Дальнейший текст: «He does not use things but relegates all to the constant. This is what it means to use clarity».

В тех переводах, которые у меня есть, это место из второй главы Чжуан-цзы переведено так:

Чтобы поняли это, скажу: оттого-то мудрый и стремится осветить хаос с помощью не [собственного] «я», а обычного и общего.

- Л.Д. Позднеева

Вот почему истинно мудрый презирает блеск изощренных речей. Он не придумывает истины, а оставляет все вещи на их обычном месте. Вот это и называется «осветить вещи светочем разума».

- В.В. Малявин

Вот еще переводы с английского:

Therefore the glitter of glib implausibilities is despised by the sage. The “That’s it” which deems he does not use, but finds for things lodging places in the usual. It is this that is meant by “using illumination.”

- A.C. Graham

Therefore the scintillations of light from the midst of confusion and perplexity are indeed valued by the sagely man; but not to use one's own views and to take his position on the ordinary views is what is called using the (proper) light.

- James Legge (перевод 1891 года)

Thus, the Radiance of Drift and Doubt is the sage’s only map. He makes no definition of what is right but instead entrusts it to the everyday function of each thing. This is what I call the Illumination of the Obvious.

- Brook Ziporyn (2009)

Интересна (особенно в контексте книги Райнхарда) разная оценка переводчиками этого вот сияния: despised или indeed valued?

Каждое общество основано на лжи. Наше сегодняшнее общество основано на конфликтующих формах лжи. Человек, который жил в простом, стабильном обществе, где существовала только одна форма лжи, впитывал систему одной формы лжи в свое единое «я» и пользовался ею всю оставшуюся жизнь, не встречая возражений со стороны своих друзей и соседей и не сознавая, что девяносто восемь процентов его убеждений иллюзорны, ценности искусственны и произвольны, а большинство его желаний комично направлено совсем не на то. В нашем обществе, где существует много форм лжи, человек впитывает хаос конфликтующей лжи, и его друзья и соседи ежедневно напоминают ему, что его убеждения не являются всеобщими, что его ценности суть личные и произвольные, а его желания часто направлены не на то. Мы должны осознать, что требовать от этого человека честности и верности себе, когда его противоречащие друг другу «я» дают множественные противоречащие друг другу ответы на большинство вопросов, есть верный и экономный метод довести его до безумия.