Quote of the day

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Existentialism...

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.” Vladimir Nabokov

And now?

“This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.” Albert Camus

And now?

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” Samuel Beckett

A golden oldie let's call it.

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.” Paul Tillich

Why take chances?

“We are gods with anuses.” Ernest Becker

Passing gas here?

"I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.” Albert Camus

God forbid that actually be true.

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Ottessa Moshfegh from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

I feel very, very alone.
We're all alone, Reva, I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.

No, sometimes it really is.

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

Not there yet? Just give it time.

Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.

Try being ugly in that world then.

This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.

Now that takes me back.

I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.

Okay, but it is to cancel.

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.

And then there is our world here.

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Doom...

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.” Henry Miller

Not yet. But things are getting scarier though.

“No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In post after post.

“No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity." H.P. Lovecraft

Let alone a fractured and fragmented identity.

“But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end---and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?" Donna Tartt

Next up: joy here.

"To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there.” Donna Tartt

Here's one for example: birth school work death.

"Hope is the great deceiver. Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.” Brent Weeks

Let's hope that's not true. Except for them.

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Despair...

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.” Dmitri Shostakovich

How's that working out for you?

“The only real laughter comes from despair.” Groucho Marx

You bet your life?

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.” Margaret Atwood

Uh, maybe?

“The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.” J R R Tolkien

One of them for sure.

“Fame you'll be famous, as famous as can be, with everyone watching you win on TV
Except when they don't because sometimes they won't” Dr. Seuss

And, of course, the equivalent of that here.

“And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
the Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Pick one?

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Suicide...

“When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and persistent deep inside me, I was tempted to take the chopping knife in the kitchen and cut the black thing out I would lie on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking about that knife and using all my limited powers of self-control to stop myself from going downstairs to get it.” Alice Jamieson

Next up: the black thing here.

“…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.” Richard Matheson

So, what's the science here?

“It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.” Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

And he knows this...how?

“I could never kill myself. I approve of suicide if you have horrible health. Otherwise it's the ultimate hissy fit.” John Waters

And he knows this...how?

“Hanged"
I hung myself today. Hanged? Whatever,
the point is I hanged myself today and I’m still
hanging.

I feel fine. Just bored. I keep hoping that
someone will come home and cut me down
but then I keep remembering that if I knew
someone like that I wouldn’t be up here. Bit
ironic, right? Or is that not ironic? I read
somewhere that, like, anything funny is,
in some way, ironic. But I don’t know if it's
funny or not. I don’t think my brain owns
“funny”, you know?

I feel taller. I like that.
I’ve never been away from my shadow for
this long. It had always clung to my feet,
parting momentarily for a quick dive into
the swimming pool. But never for five
hours. I like it. There’s three feet of space
between my two and the floor.

I wanted something this morning. I may be
stuck. But at least I’m three feet closer to it.”
Bo Burnham

Let's just say that he wrote and directed Eight Grade.

“You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.” Edouard Levé

A "wager" let's call it.

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Umberto Eco from Foucault's Pendulum

Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.

Did someone here suggest philosophy?

I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

Let's make it unanimous.

I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

Let's pretend to believe that.

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

Cue Fixed Jacob?

What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.

Like not being sent here. If it does exist.

You live on the surface, Lia told me years later. You sometimes seem profound, but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you try to stand it up.

And the equivalent of standing it up here?

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Zora Neale Hurston from Their Eyes Were Watching God

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

2024? Don't forget to vote.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.

Or, as often as not, are blinded by it.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

Anyone here recall what it was?

Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.

Next up: fuh theyselves here.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

The "human condition" let's call it.

It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

I and Thou let's call it.

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Irvin D. Yalom from When Nietzsche Wept

Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.

Not much, right? How else to explain God and religion.

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

Next up: looking deeply into death.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

That again...

I should have become an "I" before I became a "we".

And then my own rendition of that.

It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.

Let's explain that away.

It’s no great mystery. If no one will listen, it’s only natural to shout!

Ah, the Age Syndrome.

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Michael Cunningham from The Hours

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Unless, for some, you count coming here.

Beauty is a whore, I like money better.

Unless, for some, they can't tell them apart.

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...

Heaven knows lots of things like that.

These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.

Imagine Clarissa here then.

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

Not counting our souls, of course.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

Your hours might be different.
In other words, for now.

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Nihilism...

“The West is dying because of its cynicism, scepticism, agnosticism, atheism, nihilism, liberalism, political correctness, scientific materialism and capitalism – which all go together as a dreadful, despairing, grim vision of a soulless universe devoid of any value and purpose whatsoever. The West is nothing but a 'dark Satanic mill', as Blake put it." Mike Hockney

Hear! Hear!
But then this part...

"The West will fail totally unless it can regain its spirit, and that means finding religion again, but this time Logos rather than Mythos religion. Forget the old Gods. Humans themselves are the new Gods ... if they did but know it! Nietzsche said that God is dead. It’s time for him to be reincarnated ... in us!” Mike Hockney

Right, just what we need, another fucking "Ism"!

“We need an Age of Philosophers, of Enlightenment, an Age of Reason and Intellect, of Logic and Ontological Mathematics. Only then will we have the launchpad that can make Gods of us, and bring to fruition a Star Trek world where we travel through the galaxies to the heavens themselves. There’s nothing in the dreary, nihilistic, atheistic vision of scientific sophistry peddled by the likes of Sam Harris that could ever transform the human race. Humanity needs the right experts to lead it, not the wrong ones: not the charlatans, gurus and glory hunters.” Mike Hockney

You know, in a free will world.

“It is all a dream – a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought – a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.” Mark Twain

Of course, he's only paraphrasing, well, let's make a list.

“We are always awaiting the Messiah that never arrives. I long for bygone days where every dawn brought a new eschatology and an interminable queue of prophets preached humanity’s impending salvation as if it were syndicated. It must have been joyous to receive a fresh messiah weekly, and to be regaled with inspiring tales of the glory that lay ahead. When those false idols were smashed others took their place, from progress to the realization of History." Simon Brass

Let's bring them back...the good old days.

“Is there anything worse than a pessimistic nihilist who believes in nothing apart from atheism and scientism, and the doctrine that our lives are meaningless, purposeless, and pointless, that we have no free will, that we are just strange biological robots suffering from a bizarre set of illusions, and that we are nothing but collections of mindless, lifeless things that have pointlessly come together for a while. When they inevitably go their separate ways, we will die and stay dead forever. There is no afterlife. There is no hope. This is it. Life is shit and then you die. Such beliefs constitute a serious mental disorder since they are an outright attack on the mind itself. A mind that rejects its own reality is by definition a diseased and defective mind.” Thomas Stark

Or, to put another way: https://youtu.be/uRduB40_w7k?si=fCRkEDh_csmcYhFB

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Robert Musil from The Man Without Qualities

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.

Of course that's still true. If not truer.

...and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.

You tell me.

Now I have something to tell you, her brother said. Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play.

Perhaps even life itself.

People were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that has always been the image of a lunatic.

So, don't forget to vote!

And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.

Just out of curiosity, Mr. Pinhead, do you concur?

I don't believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.

Next up: the Yellowstone super-volcano. As "acts of God" go, that ought to break some records: https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/spec ... pervolcano

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God... `

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei

Tell that to the Pope.

“God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is 'no'.” Dan Brown

And look where we are now.

“God's Final Message to His Creation:
'We apologize for the inconvenience.'” Douglas Adams

That and His mysterious ways, of course.

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” A.W. Tozer

Uh, oh...

“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” Voltaire

You know, covering all bases. Or none of them.

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.” Steven Weinberg

And, he suspected, not just on this planet.

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Existentialism...

“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.” Raymond Carver

Well, we do all die, of course.
On the other hand, then what?

“The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.” Franz Kafka

Start with Emil Cioran, of course.

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.” Rollo May

Religion, of course, but don't get me started.

“If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache.” Stanley Kubrick

See, I told you. Go with God if you can.

“It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.” Matthew Stover

The one I'm in now, for example.

“A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.” Andrew Sean Greer

Next up: the virtual fragments here.

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Ottessa Moshfegh from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it's just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Sub-atomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you'll find nothing. We're mostly empty space. We're mostly nothing.

Or, as Simon Critchley put it, "Very little---Almost Nothing".

Her loyalty was absurd. This was what kept us going.

Does she know that?

If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn't worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.

Your month might be different.

I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life.

Okay, but doesn't that actually depend on the job?

The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.

Okay, I admit it.

I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.

She means faster of course.

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Despair...

“You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.” Ian McEwan

I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.

“I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.” Gustave Flaubert

Just out of curiosity, what is the use?

“And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.” Anton Chekhov

Being optimistic, of course.

“The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.” Alain de Botton

Ours and theirs, for example.

“It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, 'You stupid ass, just wait a minute,' and she’ll open her eyes! 'Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!' But they always do.” Elizabeth Wein

Oi, indeed.

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.” Blaise Pascal

Then second, third, fourth and so on.