Max Horkheimer from Dawn and Decline - as cited in Michael Löwy's Fire Alarm:

When you are at the lowest ebb, exposed to an eternity of torment inflicted upon you by other human beings, you cherish, as a dream of deliverance, the idea that a being will come who will stand in the light and bring truth and justice for you. You do not even need this to happen in this lifetime, nor in the lifetime of those who are torturing you to death, but one day, whenever it comes, all will nonetheless be repaired... It is bitter to be misunderstood and to die in obscurity. It is to the honor of historical research that it projects light into that obscurity.

* this is not in the English Translation of Dawn and Decline.
* I think of this passage often, and was surprised I hadn't posted this already.

it has been awhile

oh life. Since we last met under these circumstances, I lost a loved one to breast cancer (slightly dramatic phrasing; she's alive and well actually, just on the other side of the planet, 10,000 miles almost exactly from door to door), been super busy with school, and just trying to figure out what's next?
I have a lot of fragments of things that I need to finish writing, a bunch of quotes that I won't explain (cause I think they speak for themselves, even out of context), and even some label news: Morrow's S/T record will be here on vinyl in a few short weeks. Morrow is getting some attention in the blogs and such.

I raised this point with a journalist:
As a somewhat cynical but curious person, I was thinking about music journalism, which lead me to wonder... does the greater world of journalism at all operate the way music (and pretty much all media) journalism does; ie either through payola, who you know, or due to pressures put forth by higher ups to compete with what others are reporting? Is there any genuine sincerity left in journalism? 'cause there certainly isn't in media reporting...

This thought, and its consequences, spills over into so many areas of the everyday, that I just don't know where to start. I invoke Adorno, Tolstoy, Horkheimer, Nietzsche, Goethe, (Henry) Miller, Marcuse, Marx, and I end up feeling like Schopenhauer.