Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold Onto: Humor For Humans (Large Print) (Letting Go Is All We Have to Hold Onto: Mind-Alterng Jokes - All Editions) - Softcover

Eisenberg, Gregg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 173229691X ISBN 13: 9781732296916

Publisher: Curved-Space Comedy, 2018

Synopsis

"The pocketbook guide to people."
"The book that happened while you were making other plans."
"For people in recovery from the self-help industry."
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All humor is philosophy. But according to Austrian linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein: "An entire treatise of philosophy could be written that consists entirely of humorous statements." Author Evan Hodkins similarly wrote: "The next religion will be a catalog of jokes." And the Mexican poet Cesar Cruz correctly said: "All art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable." And now, dear reader, you have stumbled upon a curious byt relatable collection of original humor that blends all of the above, in bite-sized, easy-to-digest, family-friendly nuggets! Indeed, this bible of brain-teasers is an ideal gift for people in no shape for the human condition!
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(From the Preface) - It's rare to find a trifecta of thought streams and modalities as unexpectedly intertwined as what we find in this one-of-a-kind collection of original, one-sentence jokes, aphorisms (or "laughorisms") known as The Eisenberg Principles. In these one-sentence vignettes, the fields of philosophy, physics, and psychology marry into uproariously funny trysts of paradoxical play, each one like a piece of deluxe brain-candy which is no less serious in its treatment of the human condition as it is absurd. We are not only afforded a chance to glimpse into the thoughts of this wondrously twisted thinker, we are challenged to follow him into the surprising and impossible rabbit holes of language he unearths on every page.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time -- and still retain the ability to function." This catalog of jokes, like a set of modern Zen koans, puts you through this mental test, playing with the principles of paradox, polarity, and incongruity to take you from the comforts of cliché to the chasms of contradiction with just a few strokes of a pen.

"Eisenberg uses verbal gymnastics to twist and stretch the boundaries of logic, throwing the semantics of everyday expressions into question - hopefully stirring our collective conversation about meaning and consciousness forward."
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"An ideal gift for people who don't read books!"
"The book about quieting the mind that everyone is talking about."
"A revolutionary approach to maintaining the status quo."

About this title

From the Author

Michelangelo wrote: "You keep sculpting, and sculpting, and sculpting, until... there is nothing left to take away." And that is how I feel about this book. This material, this "carefully curated collection of contradictions" started having a logic of its own years ago. My job as a writer was to be dutiful to the muse, to follow where she led, to keep playing with language and word combinations in all their perplexing permutations, and in the end to keep editing out mediocre content until there was "nothing left to take away."-I wrote this book to uplift my friends, real and imagined, far and near, who ponder the perennial questions about the human condition (which usually have no solid answers), to keep them entertained & challenged for a few turns in the road. To keep them engaged & comforted for a few twists in the path.-Don't worry about the content being dogmatic or didactic. Or conclusive. The point of the book is to excavate & examine the everyday language we use, to pose questions about the logic and semantics which shape our thoughts, and to stir our collective conversations about the natures of time, self & society a little bit forward. -"The desire to spread levity in the world weighs heavily upon me." Gregg Eisenberg

From the Back Cover

Because this is a collection of original, one-line aphorisms, also known as "laughorisms" - this easy-to-digest compendium of carefully curated contradictions makes "an ideal gift for people who don't read books."

Edition details

• Publisher: Curved-Space Comedy
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 173229691X
• ISBN 13: 9781732296916
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 262