ponder

“We should not become misologues, as people become misanthropes.
There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.”

— Socrates, in Plato's Phaedo

quoth the madman

Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy.
Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
~Albert Camus

quoth the madman

It is said that Nietzsche after the break with Lou Salome, in a period of complete solitude, crushed and uplifted at the same time by the perspective of the huge work he had to carry on without any help, used to walk at night on the mountains overlooking the gulf of Genoa and light great bonfires of leaves and branches which he would watch as they burned. I have often dreamed of those fires

Camus

quoth the madman

My memories have turned into anxieties.

Fernando Pessoa

ponder

"Oh I know we’re not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t. ”

—Dylan Thomas, November or December 1936

pondering

“Waiting upon something is based on our belonging in that upon which we wait.”
— Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking

ponder

‘Nature,’ a torturer of genius, steeped in herself and her work, exalts with good reason: there is not a moment when what is alive fails to tremble, to make others tremble. Pity is a strange luxury only the most perfidious and the fiercest creature could invent, out of a need to punish and torture itself – out of ferocity, still.”
— E.M. Cioran - The Trouble with Being Born

literacki

"There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation’s scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there."

~André Breton: Five Ways to Kill a Man

ponder

Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. 

Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. 

There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.

— Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism

literacki

"There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight … tonight you could almost touch time."
~Ray Bradbury, “Night Meeting”, from The Martian Chronicles

ponderous

"All that exists will soon change. Either it will be turned into vapour, if all matter is unity, or it will be scattered in atoms."
— Marcus Aurelius

ponder

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
~Aristotle

ponder

"The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, though stained or broken, he comes to know a collector’s pleasure in being the sole seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by."

— Marguerite Yourcenar. Memoirs of Hadrian

pondering

"One who asks about things – about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell – is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself."

— Anne Carson. Nox.

ponder

"Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future."

— Robert Smithson. ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’

pondering

My thinking relates to theology the way a blotter does to ink. It is soaked through with it. If one were to go by the blotter, though, nothing of what has been written would remain."
 — Walter Benjanin.

literacki

"Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring./ Spring is the truth of spring or nothing, a waste, a fake."

— Wallace Stevens. from ‘Holiday in Reality.’

quoth the madman

"From early on I have suspected that the so important-sounding task “Know thyself” is a ruse of a cabal of priests. They are trying to seduce man from activity in the outside world, to distract him with impossible demands; they seek to draw him into a false inner contemplation. Man only knows himself insofar as he knows the world–the world which he only comes to know in himself and himself only in it."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe