L'appel du vide

Among south winds. – A: I no longer understand myself! Only yesterday I felt so wild and stormy and at the same time so warm, so sunny – and bright in the extreme. And today! All is now motionless, flat, dejected, gloomy, like the lagoon of Venice: – I want nothing and draw a deep breath of relief at that, and yet I am secretly vexed at this wanting nothing. Thus do the waves splash back and forth in the lake of my melancholy. – B: You have described a pleasant little illness. The next north-east wind will blow it away! – A: Why should it!
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 492

ponder

Ah! Mon ami! At last I am about to leave this world, where the heart must either break, or become hard as bronze.

Last words, Nicolas Chamfort

L'appel du vide

 "Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely."

~Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Dirge without Music”

ars poetica

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

~Stacie Cassarino, “Summer Solstice,” from Zero at the Bone

pondering

"I’ve known no other love in me
except the blue sky on dark days–"

- Pier Paolo Pasolini

ponder

"in the gaps between words are the things that really intrigue me, it is the gasps and the sighs that say more about what’s inside you."
~Maximo Parkaz

literacki

"You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it."
~“Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

ponder

"If we are misunderstood, it's only because we are epic novels in a world that prefers only to read 140 characters at a time.

ponder

"Merely killing time is actually a form of passive suicide."
~Miz Hyacinth, my Grandmother

ars poetica

I feel as though
I am being pulled by two opposing forces:
a thirst for life
and a despair for the hopeless;
towards home.
Wherever
that may
be.

~Opposing Forces, T.Wuggles

ponder

"I feel a curious stirring within me, as if undreamed of things were forcing their way up into the light and I’m helpless against them."

- Albert Camus, from Caligula & Three Other Plays

pondering

"You have all the power—you can break the silence with even with the smallest sounds. And then you don’t want to do it. You try to be as quiet as you can be."

▼

- Daniel A. Gross, from This Is Your Brain On Science

ponder

"We hesitate. Wary, ironic, disillusioned. What a difficult bridge this present has become! How many, many trips do we need to undertake so as not to be empty and invisible."

▼

- Susan Sontag, from I, etcetera: Stories

pondering

“‘Tis true without lying, certain and most true. That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below.” – Isaac Newton

ponder

“I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

ponder

“Haven’t people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?”

— Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

ponder

“Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more & more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it.””

— Franz Kafka, Diaries

literacki

“Death is a liberation because to die is to need no one else.”

— The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

quoth the madman

“Smiling despair. No solution, but constantly exercising an authority over myself that I know is useless. The essential thing is not to lose oneself, and not to lose that part of oneself that lies sleeping in the world”

— Albert Camus, Notebooks I 1935 - 1942

quoth the madman

“We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.”
Umberto Eco (1932 - 2016, RIP)

ponder

“We are the test of a salvation of which we know almost nothing.”

— François Laruelle, Christo-Fiction

ponder

"If death delivers us from the world, whether into paradise or hell, oblivion or having-been, birth introduces us to a world that is not of our making and to a past that we have the impossible task of making our own."

— Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude