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Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability

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““Happiness” is the feeling you have just before something goes wrong.”

— Eugene Thacker, from “On Pessimism” in “Infinite Resignation” (2018)

#eugene thacker #infinite resignation #mood

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“Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.”

— Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

#cormac mccarthy #the sunset limited #futility

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How Samuel Beckett Sought Salvation in the Midst of Suffering, by Andy Wimbush, pub. Aeon [ID'd]

#samuel beckett #anthropofugal #suffering

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On March 1922, Kafka mused, “What would it be like to choke to death on oneself ? If urgent self-scrutiny were to make the opening through which one pours out into the world too small or even closed off altogether? At times I am not far from that." in The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, Reiner Stach

#kafka #anthropofugal

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Goethe once asked Hegel what the 'dialectic' is, and he responded very beautifully, almost therapeutically, "[it] is basically nothing but the regulated and methodically cultivated spirit of contradiction which is innate in every human being."

Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford, New York, 1998, entry for 18 October 1827, p. 244

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Scanners 1981, David Cronenberg

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"I am not just terribly depressed at leaving her; I am terribly frightened of going back to my solitude" - Sartre, Nausea

#Sartre #nausea

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Diane Arbus, Clouds on Screen at a Drive-In Movie, N.J., 1961

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“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

- Paulo Coelho

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“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.”

— Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (via vashti)

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You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.

Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays

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And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter, they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

- Sylvia Plath

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Love never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death. Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: “I don’t understand.”

Anaïs Nin, from The Four Chambered Heart

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“Ich blieb mit meinem Denken bei den gegenwärtigen Dingen und ihren gegenwärtigen Zuständen, nicht aus Gründlichkeit oder zu sehr festgehaltenem Interesse, sondern, soweit es nicht Schwäche des Denkens verursachte, aus Traurigkeit und Furcht, aus Traurigkeit, denn weil mir die Gegenwart so traurig war, glaubte ich sie nicht verlassen zu dürfen, ehe sie sich ins Glück auflöste, aus Furcht, denn wie ich mich vor dem kleinsten gegenwärtigen Schritt fürchtete, hielt ich mich auch für unwürdig, bei meinem verächtlichen kindischen Auftreten ernstlich mit Verantwortung die große männliche Zukunft zu beurteilen, die mir auch meistens so unmöglich vorgekommen ist, daß mir jedes kleine Fortschreiten wie eine Fälschung erschien und das Nächste unerreichbar.”

— Franz Kafka, Tagebuch

#oh Kafka..