“We laugh & it pits the world against us.”

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Richard Siken 54
American poet 1967

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“In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition.”

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Page 437 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA437. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. <span class="plainlinks"> 21 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p21– 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22</span>.
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Context: In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.

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Context: But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

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“To the World, the World we show
We make the World to laugh
And teach each Hemisphere to know
How lives the Other Half.”

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Said in 1909, as quoted in Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture http://books.google.com/books?id=2NKmvLXbZesC&pg=PA171&dq=%22To+the+World,+the+World+we+show%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xsDvUsX4F-nNsQTInIHQDQ&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22To%20the%20World%2C%20the%20World%20we%20show%22&f=false.

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“He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it.”

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canular refers to hoaxes, humorous deceptions.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: You know, the Cathars believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world — which is why it doesn’t work. I don’t share this heresy. I’m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn’t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn’t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, “You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it.

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