Wednesday, 12 March 2008

So Far, So Good

I just came across this very ITLADian quote in an American magazine called The Sun:


"I intend to live forever. So far, so good." -- Steven Wright


[Coincidentally, Wright appears in the film Coffee and Cigarettes, highlighted by HurlyBurly below.]
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4 comments:

Hurlyburly said...

I love Steve Wright. I think he takes up about a quater of one of my favourite quote bookss "Ultimate Wit".

One of them is something like

"My father used to make us stand in the corner very quietly for 5 minutes everyday, he called it elevater practice"

12 March 2008 at 08:56
Dreamer said...

I probably should add the caveat that when I looked Wright up on Wikipedia, I found this:

"There are numerous lists of jokes attributed to Wright circulating on the Internet, sometimes of dubious origin. Wright has stated that 'someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad.'"

So, who knows whether he actually wrote the quote I posted. In any case, I love it, because it reminds me of the sort of thoughts I was having when I first started taking the concept of reincarnation seriously: I started thinking, What are the odds that, of all the time points in the history of the world that I could have existed, I should exist *right now*, in the present -- the most current era in which it is possible for a person to exist? Why wasn't I a caveman? Was I just lucky? I thought, Maybe I've always been here and always will be?

I know many people would find these questions idiotic, because when *else* could I exist? If I'd lived at any other point in history, I could have said the same thing in *that* present moment, and I wouldn't be here, now, in 2008, to ask the question. I'm sure someone has tried to explain it in terms of probabilities and human populations, etc., too. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, yeah -- I shouldn't just take it for granted that my existence, my consciousness now, in 2008, is due simply to randomness. In other words, So far, so good.

12 March 2008 at 10:44
Hurlyburly said...

This explains A LOT!!! I read some of his and they're absolutely classic, then i read some others and i think "what went wrong?"

12 March 2008 at 10:54
Karl Le Marcs said...

Ah the legend that is Steven Wright:
I always remember one particular quote of his (which IS his as I've seen him perform it on video), which has always struck a chord with me and how my own head works:

"You know how it feels when you're leaning back on a chair, and you lean too far back, and you almost fall over backwards, but then you catch yourself at the last second? I feel like that all the time."

12 March 2008 at 13:38

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