LAGHU YOGA VASISTHA - Lust -

„What happiness is there to be derived from the string-tossed puppets of female bodies composed of joints, muscles, bones and flesh? Oh, there will arise very fine desires no doubt, for women having soft tendrils of hair, if we once dissect (or analyse), with our minds, their eyes and other parts of the body into their components of skin, flesh and blood as well as tears, etc. The breasts of females adorned with pearl- garlands and other ornaments, like unto the waters of the Ganges with its long waves flowing down from the great Meru heights are preyed upon (or enjoyed) by bipeds like packs of dogs, licking balls of cooked rice strewn in the crematoriums in the suburbs of a town. Which person is there in this world that will not be burnt like straw when exposed to the flames of females proceeding from Agni (fire), the sin and having darkness in the shape of sable locks and scalding men with their eyes? The cool body of females (which one enjoys) serves as the dry fuel with which to burn him in hell. Dames with dark eyes are so many traps set by Kama (god of desire) to ensnare the ignorant minds of men. They resemble also the bait of flesh strung in the angling noose of excruciating torments in order to lure the fish of men in the pool of re-births replete with the mud of the dire mind. Oh, I will never long for the pleasures of women who are like caskets locking up within them infinite miseries and having, within them the gems of the endless desires, hatred, etc. If we begin to analyse this body into flesh, blood, bones, muscles, etc., then all our desires towards females, said to shine with the moon s resplendence, will become inimical to us in a short time. Only he who has a spouse (and tastes the conjugal pleasures) lusts after such an enjoyment; otherwise how can he feel the pleasures of conjugal life? If the lust of women which is the source of all enjoyments ceases, then all the worldly bondage which has its substratum in the mind will cease. With the cessation of the (conception of this) universe which exists only in name, there dawns the eternal Elysian bliss. This lust of women which, being without discrimination is enchanting at a distance, craves always, even if gratified, and flutters like the wings of a honeybee and is hard to be given up. Being afraid of the terrible consequences it works, such as diseases, death, dotage and the mental and other pains, I do not long after it now. How without its renunciation, can I expect to attain the rare Brahmic seat?‟

Time is the supreme illusion

November 16, 1864.—Heard of the death of—. Will and intelligence lasted till there was an effusion on the brain which stopped everything.

A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it were for our powers of self−detraction and forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared—disappeared—there is the whole history of a man, or of a world, or of an infusoria.

Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere must turn before the eye which is looking at it, or the eye must go round the sphere. In the first case it is the world which unrolls, or seems to unroll in time; in the second case it is our thought which successively analyzes and recomposes. For the supreme intelligence there is no time; what will be, is. Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures. God permits them, that he may not be alone. They are the mode under which creatures are possible and conceivable. Let us add that they are also the Jacob's ladder of innumerable steps by which the creation reascends to its Creator, participates in being, tastes of life, perceives the absolute, and can adore the fathomless mystery of the infinite divinity. That is the other side of the question. Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal. To escape by the ecstasy of inward vision from the whirlwind of time, to see one's self sub specie eterni is the word of command of all the great religions of the higher races; and this psychological possibility is the foundation of all great hopes. The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise toward that which is neither born nor dies, toward that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say toward God.

Amiel's Journal

An appearance, a vanity, a nothing

How sensible I am to the restless change which rules the world. To appear, and to vanish—there is then biography of all individuals, whatever may be the length of the cycle of existence which they describe, and the drama of the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a smoke−wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph traced for an instant in the sand, and effaced a moment afterward by a breath of wind, an air−bubble expanding and vanishing on the surface of the great river of being—an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this nothing is, however, the symbol of the universal being, and this passing bubble is the epitome of the history of the world.

Amiel's Journal

Bad principles

Liberty, equality—bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice, and justice toward the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.

Amiel

To personify and embody the eternal, is to be religious

Wisdom! how inexhaustible a theme! A sort of peaceful aureole surrounds and illumines this thought, in which are summed up all the treasures of moral experience, and which is the ripest fruit of a well−spent life. Wisdom never grows old, for she is the expression of order itself—that is, of the Eternal. Only the wise man draws from life, and from every stage of it, its true savor, because only he feels the beauty, the dignity, and the value of life. The flowers of youth may fade, but the summer, the autumn, and even the winter of human existence, have their majestic grandeur, which the wise man recognizes and glorifies. To see all things in God; to make of one's own life a journey toward the ideal; to live with gratitude, with devoutness, with gentleness and courage; this was the splendid aim of Marcus Aurelius. And if you add to it the humility which kneels, and the charity which gives, you have the whole wisdom of the children of God, the immortal joy which is the heritage of the true Christian. But what a false Christianity is that which slanders wisdom and seeks to do without it! In such a case I am on the side of wisdom, which is, as it were, justice done to God, even in this life. The relegation of life to some distant future, and the separation of the holy man from the virtuous man, are the signs of a false religious conception. This error is, in some degree, that of the whole Middle Age, and belongs, perhaps, to the essence of Catholicism. But the true Christianity must purge itself from so disastrous a mistake. The eternal life is not the future life; it is life in harmony with the true order of things—life in God. We must learn to look upon time as a movement of eternity, as an undulation in the ocean of being. To live, so as to keep this consciousness of ours in perpetual relation with the eternal, is to be wise; to live, so as to personify and embody the eternal, is to be religious.

Amiel's Journal

Landscape of Estrangement and Exile

Tower of Silence of my yearnings, may this book be the moonlight that transformed you on the night of the Ancient Mystery!

River of painful Imperfection, may this book be the boat that drifts with your waters until it ends in the dreamed see.

Landscape of Estrangement and Exile, may this book be yours like your very Hour, and not be limited by you or by the Hour of false purples.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 444

Virgin King who disdained love

“What do you have”, she said , “that binds you to life? Love doesn't follow you, glory doesn't seek you, and power doesn't find you. The house that you inherit was in ruins. The lands you received had already lost their first fruits to frost, and the sun had withered their promises. You have never found water in your farm's well. And before you ever saw them, the leaves had all rotted in your pools; weeds covered the paths and walkways where your feet had never trod.

“But in my domain, where only the night reigns,you will be consoled, for you hopes will have ceased; you will be able to forget, for your desire will have died; you will finally rest, for you'll have no life”.

(…)

Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that gradually wanders among the worlds ruins and wastes!

(…)

Virgin King who disdained love,

Shadow King who disdained light,

Dream King who denied life!

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

Emily Brontë

It was over ten years ago that I read Wuthering Heights. Have just read it again aloud to E—— and am delighted and amazed. When I came to the dreadfully moving passages of talk between Cathy and Heathcliff —
‘"Let me alone, let me alone,” sobbed Catherine. “If I have done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough! You left me too! But I won’t upbraid you for it! I forgive you! Forgive me!”
‘"It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,” he answered. “Kiss me again, and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive you what you have done to me. I love my murderer — but yours? How can I?"’ —
I had to stop and burst out laughing, or I should have burst into tears. E—— came over and we read the rest of the chapter together.
I can well understand the remark of Charlotte, a little startled and propitiatory — that having created the book, Emily did not know what she had done. She was the last person to appreciate her own work.
Emily was fascinated by the beaux yeux of fierce male cruelty, and she herself once, in a furious rage, blinded her pet bulldog with blows from her clenched fist. Wuthering Heights is a story of fiendish cruelty and maniacal love passion. Its preternatural power is the singular result of three factors in rarest combination — rare genius, rare moorland surroundings, and rare character. One might almost write her down as Mrs. Nietzsche — her religious beliefs being a comparatively minor divergence. However that may be, the young woman who wrote in the poem ‘A Prisoner’ that she didn’t care whether she went to Heaven or Hell so long as she was dead, is no fit companion for the young ladies of a seminary. ‘No coward soul is mine,’ she tells us in another poem, with her fist held to our wincing nose. I, for one, believe her. It would be idle to pretend to love Emily Brontë, but I venerate her most deeply. Even at this distance, I feel an immediate awe of her person. For her, nothing held any menace. She was adamant over her ailing flesh, defiant of death and the lightnings of her mortal anguish — and her name was Thunder!

W. N. P. Barbellion, 

"The night is darkening round me"

The night is darkening round me
The wild winds coldly blow
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot cannot go

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go

Clouds beyond clouds above me
Wastes beyond wastes below
But nothing dear can move me
I will not cannot go

 Emily Jane Brontë

Hadot - Socratic ignorance

Socratic ignorance and the critique of sophistic knowledge In the Apology, Plato reconstructs, in his own way, the speech which Socrates gave before his judges in the trial in which he was condemned to death. Plato tells how Chaerephon, one of Socrates’ [p. 25] friends, had asked the Delphic oracle if there was anyone wiser (sophos) than Socrates. The oracle had replied that no one was wiser than Socrates. Socrates wondered what the oracle could possibly have meant, and began a long search among politicians, poets, and artisans — people who, according to the Greek tradition discussed in the previous chapter, possessed wisdom or know-how — in order to find someone wiser than he. He noticed that all these people thought they knew everything, whereas in fact they knew nothing. Socrates then concluded that if in fact he was the wisest person, it was because he did not think he knew that which he did not know. What the oracle meant, therefore, was that the wisest human being was “he who knows that he is worth nothing as far as knowledge is concerned.” This is precisely the Platonic definition of the philosopher in the dialogue entitled the Symposium: the philosopher knows nothing, but he is conscious of his ignorance.

Socrates’ task — entrusted to him, says the Apology, by the Delphic oracle (in other words, the god Apollo) — was therefore to make other people recognize their lack of knowledge and of wisdom. In order to accomplish this mission, Socrates himself adopted the attitude of someone who knew nothing — an attitude of naiveté. This is the well-known Socratic irony: the feigned ignorance and candid air with which, for instance, he asked questions in order to find out whether someone was wiser than he. In the words of a character from the Republic: “That’s certainly Socrates’ old familiar irony! I knew it. I predicted to every one present, Socrates, that you’d do anything but reply if someone asked you a question.”

This is why Socrates is always the questioner in his discussions. As Aristotle remarked, “He admits that he knows nothing.” According to Cicero, “Socrates used to denigrate himself, and concede more than was necessary to the interlocutors he wanted to refute. Thus, thinking one thing and saying another, he took pleasure [p. 26] in that dissimulation which the Greeks call ‘irony’.” In fact, however, such an attitude is not a form of artifice or intentional dissimulation. Rather, it is a kind of humour which refuses to take oneself or other people entirely seriously; for everything human, and even everything philosophical, is highly uncertain, and we have no right to be proud of it. Socrates’ mission, then, was to make people aware of their lack of knowledge.

This was a revolution in the concept of knowledge. To be sure, Socrates could and willingly did address himself to the common people, who had only conventional knowledge and acted only under the influence of prejudices without any basis in reflection, in order to show them that their so-called knowledge had nofoundation. Above all, however, Socrates addressed himself to those who had been persuaded by their education that they possessed Knowledge. Prior to Socrates, there had been two types of such people. On the one hand, there had been the aristocrats of knowledge, or masters of wisdom and truth, such as Parmenides, Empedocles, and Heraclitus, who opposed their theories to the ignorance of the mob. On the other hand, there had been the democrats of knowledge, who claimed to be able to sell their knowledge to all comers; these were, of course, the Sophists. For Socrates, knowledge was not an ensemble of propositions and formulas which could be written, communicated, or sold readymade. This is apparent at the beginning of the Symposium. Socrates arrives late because he has been outside meditating, standing motionless and “applying his mind to itself.” When he enters the room, Agathon, who is the host, asks him tocome sit next to him, so that “by contact with you ... I may profit from this windfall of wisdom which you have just stumbled across.” “How nice it would be,” replies Socrates, “if wisdom were the kind of thing that could flow from what is more full into what is more empty.” This means that knowledge is not a prefabricated object, or a finished content [p. 27] which can be directly transmitted by writing or by just discourse.

When Socrates claims that he knows only one thing — namely, that he does not know anything — he is repudiating the traditional concept of knowledge. His philosophical method consists not in transmitting knowledge (which would mean responding to his disciples’ questions) but in questioning his disciples, for he himself has nothing to say to them or teach them, so far as the theoretical  content of knowledge is concerned. Socratic irony consists in pretending that one wants to learn something from one’s interlocutor, in order to bring him to the point of discovering that he knows nothing of the area in which he claims to be wise.

Yet this critique of knowledge, although it seems entirely negative, has a double meaning. On the one hand, it presupposes that knowledge and truth, as we have already seen, cannot be received ready-made, but must be engendered by the individual himself. This is why Socrates says in the Theaetetus that when he talks with other people, he contents himself with the role of midwife. He himself  knows nothing and teaches nothing, but is content to ask questions; and it is Socrates’ questions and interrogations which help his interlocutors to give birth to “their” truth. Such an image shows that knowledge is found within the soul itself and it is up to the individual to discover it, once he has discovered, thanks to Socrates, that his own knowledge was empty. From the point of view of his own thought, Plato expressed this idea mythically, by saying that all knowledge is the remembrance of a vision which the soul has had in a previous existence. We thus have to learn how to remember.

On the other hand, in Socrates the point of view is wholly different. Socrates’ questions do not lead his interlocutor to know something, or to wind up with conclusions which could be formulated in the form of propositions on a given subject. Rather, it [p. 28] is because the interlocutor discovers the vanity of his knowledge that he will at the same time discover his truth. In other words, by passing from knowledge to himself, he will begin to place himself in question. In the Socratic dialogue, the real question is less what is being talked about than who is doing the talking. This is made explicit by Nicias, one of Plato’s characters:

Don’t you know that whoever approached Socrates closely and begins a dialogue with him, even if he begins by talking about something entirely different, nevertheless finds himself forcibly carried around in a circle by this discourse, until he gets to the point of having to give an account of himself — as much with regard to the way his is living now, as to the way he has lived his past existence. When that point is reached, Socrates doesn’t let you leave until he has submitted all that to the test of his control, well and thoroughly...It is a pleasure for me to keep company with him. I see no harm in being reminded that I have acted or am acting in a way that is not good. He who does not run away from this will necessarily be more prudent in the rest of his life.

Thus, Socrates brought his interlocutors to examine and become aware of themselves. “Like a gadfly,” Socrates harassed his interlocutors with questions which placed them in question, and obliged them to pay attention to themselves and to take care of themselves: “What? Dear friend, you are an Athenian, citizen of a city greater and more famous than any other for its science and its power, and you do not blush at the fact that you give care to your fortune, in order to increase it as much as possible, and to your reputation and your honours; but when it comes to your thought, to your truth, to your soul, which you ought to be improving, you have no care for it, and you don’t think of it!” (Apology, 29d-e).

The point was thus not so much to question the apparent knowledge we think we have, as to question ourselves and the values which guide our own lives. In the last analysis, Socrates’ interlocutor, [p. 29] after carrying on a dialogue with him, no longer has any idea of why he acts. He becomes aware of the contradictions in his discourse, and of his own internal contradictions. He doubts himself; and, like Socrates, he comes to know that he knows nothing. As he does this, however, he assumes a distance with regard to himself. He splits into two parts, one of which henceforth identifies itself with Socrates, in the mutual accord which Socrates demands from his interlocutor at each stage of the discussion. The interlocutor thus acquires awareness and begins to question himself.

The real problem is therefore not the problem of knowing this or that, but of being in this or that way: “I have no concern at all for what most people are concerned about: financial affairs, administration of property, appointments to generalships, oratorical triumphs in public, magistracies, coalitions, political other words, the god Apollo) — was therefore to make other people recognize factions. I did not take this path...but rather the one where I could do the most good to each one of you in particular, by persuading you to be less concerned with what you have than with what you are; so that you may make yourselves as excellent and as rational as possible.” Socrates practiced this call to being not only by means of his interrogations and his irony, but above all by means of his way of being; by his way of life, and by his very being.

src: Pierre Hadot (2004), What is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael
Chase, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

True vision of things

If I could only go back to being a child and remain one for ever, oblivious to the values that man attached to things and to the relations they established between them! (…)

Gold is worth no more than glass to a child. And is gold value truly greater? The child obscurely senses the absurdity of the wraths, passions and fears he sees sculpted in adult gestures. And aren't all our fears, hatreds and loves truly vain and absurd?

O divinely absurd intuition of children! True vision of things, which we always dress with conventions, however nakedly we see them, and always blur with our ideas, however directly we look at them!

Might not God be an enormous child? Doesn't the whole universe seem like a game, like the prank of mischievous child? So unreal, so …

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 406

Very important

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It's exceedingly important that we not love.)

Pessoa

The horror of transforming our soul into fact

To have sure and definite opinions, passions, and a dependable, recognizable charter – all of this leads to the horror of transforming our soul into fact, into a material and external thing.

Pessoa

Yet I still believe ...

November 25, 1863.—Prayer is the essential weapon of all religions. He who can no longer pray because he doubts whether there is a being to whom prayer ascends and from whom blessing descends, he indeed is cruelly solitary and prodigiously impoverished. And you, what do you believe about it? At this moment I should find it very difficult to say. All my positive beliefs are in the crucible ready for any kind of metamorphosis. Truth above all, even when it upsets and overwhelms us! But what I believe is that the highest idea we can conceive of the principle of things will be the truest, and that the truest truth is that which makes man the most wholly good, wisest, greatest, and happiest.

My creed is in transition. Yet I still believe in God, and the immortality of the soul. I believe in holiness, truth, beauty; I believe in the redemption of the soul by faith in forgiveness. I believe in love, devotion, honor. I believe in duty and the moral conscience. I believe even in prayer. I believe in the fundamental intuitions of the human race, and in the great affirmations of the inspired of all ages. I believe that our higher nature is our truer nature.

Can one get a theology and a theodicy out of this? Probably, but just now I do not see it distinctly. It is so long since I have ceased to think about my own metaphysic, and since I have lived in the thoughts of others, that I am ready even to ask myself whether the crystallization of my beliefs is necessary. Yes, for preaching and acting; less for studying, contemplating and learning.

Amiel's Journal

The eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of ironical contemplation

November 7, 1862.—How malign, infectious, and unwholesome is the eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of ironical contemplation, which corrodes and demolishes everything, that mocking pitiless temper, which holds itself aloof from every personal duty and every vulnerable affection, and cares only to understand without committing itself to action! Criticism become a habit, a fashion, and a system, means the destruction of moral energy, of faith, and of all spiritual force. One of my tendencies leads me in this direction, but I recoil before its results when I come across more emphatic types of it than myself. And at least I cannot reproach myself with having ever attempted to destroy the moral force of others; my reverence for life forbade it, and my self−distrust has taken from me even the temptation to it. This kind of temper is very dangerous among us, for it flatters all the worst instincts of men—indiscipline, irreverence, selfish individualism—and it ends in social atomism. Minds inclined to mere negation are only harmless in great political organisms, which go without them and in spite of them. The multiplication of them among ourselves will bring about the ruin of our little countries, for small states only live by faith and will. Woe to the society where negation rules, for life is an affirmation; and a society, a country, a nation, is a living whole capable of death. No nationality is possible without prejudices, for public spirit and national tradition are but webs woven out of innumerable beliefs which have been acquired, admitted, and continued without formal proof and without discussion. To act, we must believe; to believe, we must make up our minds, affirm, decide, and in reality prejudge the question. He who will only act upon a full scientific certitude is unfit for practical life. But we are made for action, and we cannot escape from duty. Let us not, then, condemn prejudice so long as we have nothing but doubt to put in its place, or laugh at those whom we should be incapable of consoling! This, at least, is my point of view.

Amiel's Journal

To take abdication to unprecedented heights

Since every step I took in life brought to me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That's why haw badly life terrifies and tortures me.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 397

Forever trapped in myself

An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation.

Pessoa

For me

For me the outer world is an inner reality. I feel this not in in some metaphysical way, but with the senses normally used to grasp reality.

Pessoa

The ecstasy that doesn't include life!

Living isn't worth our while. Only seeing is. To be able to see without living would bring happiness, but this is impossible, like virtually everything we dream. How great would be the ecstasy that didn't include life!

Pessoa

Life, which seeks its own continuance ...

August 9, 1862.—Life, which seeks its own continuance, tends to repair itself without our help. It mends its spider's webs when they have been torn; it re−establishes in us the conditions of health, and itself heals the injuries inflicted upon it; it binds the bandage again upon our eyes, brings back hope into our hearts, breathes health once more into our organs, and regilds the dream of our imagination. But for this, experience would have hopelessly withered and faded us long before the time, and the youth would be older than the centenarian. The wise part of us, then, is that which is unconscious of itself; and what is most reasonable in man are those elements in him which do not reason. Instinct, nature, a divine, an impersonal activity, heal in us the wounds made by our own follies; the invisible genius of our life is never tired of providing material for the prodigalities of the self. The essential, maternal basis of our conscious life, is therefore that unconscious life which we perceive no more than the outer hemisphere of the moon perceives the earth, while all the time indissolubly and eternally bound to it. It is our [Greek: antichoon], to speak with Pythagoras.

Amiel's Journal

Every man is a tamer of wild beasts, and these wild beasts are his passions

November 25, 1861.—To understand a drama requires the same mental operation as to understand an existence, a biography, a man. It is a putting back of the bird into the egg, of the plant into its seed, a reconstitution of the whole genesis of the being in question. Art is simply the bringing into relief of the

obscure thought of nature; a simplification of the lines, a falling into place of groups otherwise invisible. The fire of inspiration brings out, as it were, designs traced beforehand in sympathetic ink. The mysterious grows clear, the confused plain; what is complicated becomes simple—what is accidental, necessary. In short, art reveals nature by interpreting its intentions and formulating its desires. Every ideal is the key of a long enigma. The great artist is the simplifier.

Every man is a tamer of wild beasts, and these wild beasts are his passions. To draw their teeth and claws, to muzzle and tame them, to turn them into servants and domestic animals, fuming, perhaps, but submissive—in this consists personal education.

Amiel's Journal

The uniting link of the two contradictions

September 12, 1861.—In me an intellect which would fain forget itself in things, is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human beings. The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency toward self−abandonment, toward ceasing to will and exist for one's self, toward laying down one's own personality, and losing —dissolving—one's self in love and contemplation. What I lack above all things is character, will, individuality. But, as always happens, the appearance is exactly the contrary of the reality, and my outward life the reverse of my true and deepest aspiration. I whose whole being—heart and intellect—thirsts to absorb itself in reality, in its neighbor man, in nature and in God, I, whom solitude devours and destroys, I shut myself up in solitude and seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient for myself. Pride and delicacy of soul, timidity of heart, have made me thus do violence to all my instincts and invert the natural order of my life. It is not astonishing that I should be unintelligible to others. In fact I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired to be.

“Deux instincts sont en moi: vertige et deraison;

J'ai l'effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.”

It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of life, the secret instinct and power of death in us, which labors continually for the destruction of all that seeks to be, to take form, to exist; it is the passion for destruction, the tendency toward suicide, identifying itself with the instinct of self−preservation. This antipathy toward all that does one good, all that nourishes and heals, is it not a mere variation of the antipathy to moral light and regenerative truth? Does not sin also create a thirst for death, a growing passion for what does harm? Discouragement has been my sin. Discouragement is an act of unbelief. Growing weakness has been the consequence of it; the principle of death in me and the influence of the Prince of Darkness have waxed stronger together. My will in abdicating has yielded up the scepter to instinct; and as the corruption of the best results in what is worst, love of the ideal, tenderness, unworldliness, have led me to a state in which I shrink from hope and crave for annihilation. Action is my cross.

Amiel's Journal

There is no ground without a master

The free being who abandons the conduct of himself, yields himself to Satan; in the moral world there is no ground without a master, and the waste lands belong to the Evil One.

Amiel

To grow old is more difficult than to die

May 5, 1860.—To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all, costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. To bear with one's own decay, to accept one's own lessening capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death.

*****

There is a halo round tragic and premature death; there is but a long sadness in declining strength. But look closer: so studied, a resigned and religious old age will often move us more than the heroic ardor of young years. The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first brilliance of its faculties, or the plentitude of its strength, and the eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages made by time. There is comfort in this thought.

Amiel's Journal

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and phantasm ...

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and phantasm, than we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities.

Pessoa

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face – there's nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

Only in the water of revers and pound could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 384

I feel free, as if I'd ceased to exist ...

Peace at least. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I'm alone and calm. It's like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I'm no longer attracted to anything down here, I'm also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I'd ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 381

My attempt to break off all contact with things

But my self-imposed exile from life's actions and objectives and my attempt to break off all contact with things led precisely to what I tried to escape. I didn't want to feel life or to touch anything real, for the experience of my temperament in contact with the world had taught me that the sensation of life was always painful to me. But in isolating myself to avoid that contact, I exacerbated my already overwrought sensibility. If it were possible to cut off completely all contact with things, than my sensibility would pose no problem. But this total isolation cannot be achieved. However little I do, I still breathe; however little I act, I still move. And so, having exacerbated my sensibility through isolation, I found that the tiniest things, which even for me had been perfectly innocuous, began to wrack me like catastrophes. I chose the wrong method of escape. I fled via an uncomfortable and roundabout route to end up at the same place I'd started from, with the fatigue of my journey added to the horror of living there.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 380

Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die ...

"Laurence Sterne's great invention was the novel that is completely comprised of digressions, an example followed by Diderot. The digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion in flight. But flight from what? From death, of course, says Carlo Levi, in an introduction he wrote to an Italian edition of Tristram Shandy:

"'The clock is Shandy's first signal. Under its influence he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are one and the same with this emblem of time. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said; and the unhappiness of an individual life, of this fragment, this divided, disunited thing, divorced of wholeness: death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die. Every means and every weapon is valid to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows -- perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.'"

Italo Calvino: from Quickness, in Six Proposals for the Next Millennium, 1985 (published posthumously, 1988)

Eyes

Several months had passed since I had seen Ante Pavelić and when I entered his study, I noticed that he had changed the arrangement of the furniture. The last time I had called on him, a few months before, his desk was at the end of the room, in the corner farthest from the window. Now it stood directly in front of the door, with just enough room between the door and the desk to allow one man to get by. I went in and almost knocked my knees against the desk.

"It's a plan of my own devising," said Ante Pavelić, shaking my hand and laughing. "Anyone coming in here with criminal intentions, bumping into the desk and facing me suddenly, will lose his composure and betray himself. Hitler and Mussolini have a different plan; they interpose the empty space of a very large room between themselves and their visitors."

I watched him while he spoke. He seemed to me greatly changed; tired, marked with fatigue and worry. His eyes were reddened by lack of sleep. But his voice as it had been before -- deep, musical and very sweet -- was the voice of a good-natured, simple and generous man. His huge ears had grown strangely thinner. They had grown transparent. Through the right ear that was turned toward the window, I could see the pink reflection of the roofs, the green light of the trees and the blue sky. The other ear that was turned toward one of the walls, was in the shadow and seemed to be made of a white, soft and fragile substance -- an ear of wax. I studied Ante Pavelić, his thick hairy hands, his low, hard, obstinate brow, his monstrous ears, and I was overcome by a kind of pity toward that good-natured, simple and generous man, endowed with such a delicate sense of humanity. The political situation had become considerably worse during those few months. The rebellion of the partisans raged throughout Croatia from Zemun to Zagreb. The pale, almost ashen face of the Poglavnik was marked with a sorrow that was deep and sincere. How grievously his excellent heart must suffer, I thought.

After a while, Major Makiedo came in to announce the Italian Minister, Raffaele Casertano. "Let him come in," said Ante Pavelić. "The Italian Minister must not be kept waiting."

Casertano came in and we spent a long time discussing simply and cordially the gravity of the situation. The partisan bands had pushed by night into the very suburbs of Zagreb, but the loyal ustashis of Pavelić would soon squash those tiresome guerillas. "The Croatian people," said Ante Pavelić, "wish to be ruled with goodness and justice. And I am here to provide them."


While he spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik's desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters -- as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano looked at me and winked, "Would you like a nice oyster stew?"

"Are they Dalmatian oysters?" I asked the Poglavnik.

Ante Pavelić removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, "It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes."

from: Curzio Malaparte:  Kaputt, 1943, translated by Cesare Foligno, 1946

Charls Bukowski letter to friend

Quoted from Reach for the Sun, vol. 3 ~ Charles Bukowski’s Selected Letters.
 

8.12.1986

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

When I think nothing, want nothing, and dream nothing

My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing, and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life's surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 379

To notice everything for the first time

How could I love right now to be able to see all this as somebody whose only relation to it was visual – to everything as an adult traveller who has just arrived at the surface of life! To not have learned from birth to attached predetermined meanings to all these things. To be able to see them in their natural self-expression, irrespective of the expressions that have been imposed on them. To be able to recognize the fish wife in her human reality, independent of her being called a fishwife and my knowing that she exist and sells fish. To see the policeman as God sees him. To notice everything for the first time, not as a apocalyptic revelations of life's Mystery, but as direct manifestations of Reality.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 377

How frail a thing is health

April 17, 1860.—The cloud has lifted; I am better. I have been able to take my usual walk on the Treille; all the buds were opening and the young shoots were green on all the branches. The rippling of clear water, the merriment of birds, the young freshness of plants, and the noisy play of children, produce a strange effect upon an invalid. Or rather it was strange to me to be looking at such things with the eyes of a sick and dying man; it was my first introduction to a new phase of experience. There is a deep sadness in it. One feels one's self cut off from nature—outside her communion as it were. She is strength and joy and eternal health. “Room for the living,” she cries to us; “do not come to darken my blue sky with your miseries; each has his turn: begone!” But to strengthen our own courage, we must say to ourselves, No; it is good for the world to see suffering and weakness; the sight adds zest to the joy of the happy and the careless, and is rich in warning for all who think. Life has been lent to us, and we owe it to our traveling companions to let them see what use we make of it to the end. We must show our brethren both how to live and how to die. These first summonses of illness have besides a divine value; they give us glimpses behind the scenes of life; they teach us something of its awful reality and its inevitable end. They teach us sympathy. They warn us to redeem the time while it is yet day. They awaken in us gratitude for the blessings which are still ours, and humility for the gifts which are in us. So that, evils though they seem, they are really an appeal to us from on high, a touch of God's fatherly scourge.

How frail a thing is health, and what a thin envelope protects our life against being swallowed up from without, or disorganized from within! A breath, and the boat springs a leak or founders; a nothing, and all is endangered; a passing cloud, and all is darkness! Life is indeed a flower which a morning withers and the beat of a passing wing breaks down; it is the widow's lamp, which the slightest blast of air extinguishes. In order to realize the poetry which clings to morning roses, one needs to have just escaped from the claws of that vulture which we call illness. The foundation and the heightening of all things is the graveyard. The only certainty in this world of vain agitations and endless anxieties, is the certainty of death, and that which is the foretaste and small change of death—pain.

As long as we turn our eyes away from this implacable reality, the tragedy of life remains hidden from us. As soon as we look at it face to face, the true proportions of everything reappear, and existence becomes solemn again. It is made clear to us that we have been frivolous and petulant, intractable and forgetful, and that we have been wrong.

We must die and give an account of our life: here in all its simplicity is the teaching of sickness! “Do with all diligence what you have to do; reconcile yourself with the law of the universe; think of your duty; prepare yourself for departure:” such is the cry of conscience and of reason.

Amiel's Journal

Nature is forgetful

August 9, 1859.—Nature is forgetful: the world is almost more so. However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear—there is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life. Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. I feel myself returning into a more elementary form. I behold my own unclothing; I forget, still more than I am forgotten; I pass gently into the grave while still living, and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impalpable shadows of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks the cateleptic tranquillity which enwraps me .

Amiel's Journal

Robert Walser

The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have been almost effaced altogether. Later, after his return to Switzerland in the spring of 1913, but in truth from the very beginning, he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways. Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. He had neither a house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one less so. Even among the tools a writer needs to carry out his craft were almost none he could call his own. He did not, I believe, even own the books that he had written. What he read was for the most part borrowed. Even the paper he used for writing was secondhand. And just as throughout his life he was almost entirely devoid of material possessions, so, too, was he remote from other people. He became more and more distant from even the siblings originally closest to him—the painter Karl and the beautiful schoolteacher Lisa—until in the end, as Martin Walser said of him, he was the most unattached of all solitary poets.

For him, evidently, coming to an arrangement with a woman was an impossibility. ...

Read more →

There's peace on the other side of the hills

… what can the wise man do but ask to retire, to be excused from having to think about life (since living it is already burdensome enough), to have a little sun and fresh air and at least the dream that there's peace on the other side of the hills?

Pessoa

No empire justifies breaking a child's toy

Reading about the effect of wars and revolutions – there's always one or the other in the news – doesn't make us feel horror but tedium. What really disturbs our soul isn't the cruel fate of all the dead and wounded, the sacrifice of all who die in action or who die without seeing action, but the stupidity that sacrifices lives and property to some inevitably futile cause. All ideas and all ambitions are a hysteria of prattling woman poising a man. No empire justifies breaking a child's toy. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a toy train.

Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 373-374

The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves

Never to feel his own feelings sincerely, and to rise his pallid triumph to the point of regarding his own ambitions, longings and desires with indifference; to pass alongside his joys anxieties as if passing by someone who doesn't interest him …

The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves, to see our body and soul as merely the house and grounds where Destiny willed that we spend our life. To treat our own dreams and deepest desires with arrogance, en grand seigneur, politely and carefully ignoring them. To act modestly in our own presence; to realize that we are never truly alone, since we are our own witnesses, and should therefore act before ourselves as before a stranger, with a studied and serene outward manner – indifferent because it's noble, and cold because it's indifferent.

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 351-352

Those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys...

Wandering across a city — walking often quite alone, down dark alleys, through unfrequented districts and debouching suddenly onto main thoroughfares where for a spell one follows the main stream, is adopted by a group "he has come where we come from, wants to go where we want to go". For a while it is true but the side streets are there. Pause in one of them for a moment, and the stream has moved on. So, as there is no catching up with the group, there is no more reason to return to the main street than to wander away from it... more alleys... more thoroughfares... Where shall we be sleeping tonight? And those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys...

Nanamoli Thera (May 51)

An agony of incurable disillusion

July 14, 1859.—I have just read “Faust” again. Alas, every year I am fascinated afresh by this somber figure, this restless life. It is the type of suffering toward which I myself gravitate, and I am always finding in the poem words which strike straight to my heart. Immortal, malign, accursed type! Specter of my own conscience, ghost of my own torment, image of the ceaseless struggle of the soul which has not yet found its true aliment, its peace, its faith—art thou not the typical example of a life which feeds upon itself, because it has not found its God, and which, in its wandering flight across the worlds, carries within it, like a comet, an inextinguishable flame of desire, and an agony of incurable disillusion? I also am reduced to nothingness, and I shiver on the brink of the great empty abysses of my inner being, stifled by longing for the unknown, consumed with the thirst for the infinite, prostrate before the ineffable. I also am torn sometimes by this blind passion for life, these desperate struggles for happiness, though more often I am a prey to complete exhaustion and taciturn despair. What is the reason of it all? Doubt—doubt of one's self, of thought, of men, and of life—doubt which enervates the will and weakens all our powers, which makes us forget God and neglect prayer and duty—that restless and corrosive doubt which makes existence impossible and meets all hope with satire.

July 17, 1859.—Always and everywhere salvation is torture, deliverance means death, and peace lies in sacrifice. If we would win our pardon, we must kiss the fiery crucifix. Life is a series of agonies, a Calvary, which we can only climb on bruised and aching knees. We seek distractions; we wander away; we deafen and stupefy ourselves that we may escape the test; we turn away oar eyes from the via dolorosa; and yet there is no help for it—we must come back to it in the end. What we have to recognize is that each of us carries within himself his own executioner—his demon, his hell, in his sin; that his sin is his idol, and that this idol, which seduces the desire of his heart, is his curse.

Die unto sin! This great saying of Christianity remains still the highest theoretical solution of the inner life. Only in it is there any peace of conscience; and without this peace there is no peace....

Amiel's Journal

A hundred years seemed to me a dream

... I have been dreaming alone since ten o'clock at the window, while the stars twinkled among the clouds, and the lights of the neighbors disappeared one by one in the houses round. Dreaming of what? Of the meaning of this tragic comedy which we call life. Alas! alas! I was as melancholy as the preacher. A hundred years seemed to me a dream, life a breath, and everything a nothing. What tortures of mind and soul, and all that we may die in a few minutes! What should interest us, and why?

“Le temps n'est rien pour l'ame, enfant, ta vie est pleine,

Et ce jour vaut cent ans, s'il te fait trouver Dieu.”

To make an object for myself, to hope, to struggle, seems to me more and more impossible and amazing. At twenty I was the embodiment of curiosity, elasticity and spiritual ubiquity; at thirty−seven I have not a will, a desire, or a talent left; the fireworks of my youth have left nothing but a handful of ashes behind them.

Amiel's Journal

Avoid getting close – that's true nobility

Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.

Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.

Women are good source of dreams. Don't touch them.

Learn to disassociate the ideas of voluptuousness and pleasure. Learn to delight in everything, not for what it is, but for the ideas and dreams it kindles. (Because nothing is what it is, but dreams are always dreams.) To accomplish this, you mustn't touch anything. As soon as you touch it, your dream will die; the touched object will occupy your capacity for feeling.

Seeing* and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close – that's true nobility.

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 351

Vision is a double faculty: it cognizes both colour and shape. The eye touches what it sees (it is only necessary to run the eye first across and then down some vertical lines or bars to discover this), and the result is coloured shapes. The eye is capable of intentional movement more delicate even than the fingers, and the corresponding perception of shapes is even more subtle.

Nanavira Thera

The phantasmagoria of the soul

February 3, 1857.—The phantasmagoria of the soul cradles and soothes me as though I were an Indian yoghi, and everything, even my own life, becomes to me smoke, shadow, vapor, and illusion. I hold so lightly to all phenomena that they end by passing over me like gleams over a landscape, and are gone without leaving any impression. Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists. It is by love only that one keeps hold upon reality, that one recovers one's proper self, that one becomes again will, force, and individuality. Love could do everything with me; by myself and for myself I prefer to be nothing....

I have the imagination of regret and not that of hope. My clear−sightedness is retrospective, and the result with me of disinterestedness and prudence is that I attach myself to what I have no chance of obtaining....

Amiel's Journal

The depth of darkness, the abyss of the un−revealed

October 27, 1856.—In all the chief matters of life we are alone, and our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations, all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down. What is most precious in us never shows itself, never finds an issue even in the closest intimacy. Only a part of it reaches our consciousness, it scarcely enters into action except in prayer, and is perhaps only perceived by God, for our past rapidly becomes strange to us. Our monad may be influenced by other monads, but none the less does it remain impenetrable to them in its essence; and we ourselves, when all is said, remain outside our own mystery. The center of our consciousness is unconscious, as the kernel of the sun is dark. All that we are, desire, do, and know, is more or less superficial, and below the rays and lightnings of our periphery there remains the darkness of unfathomable substance.

I was then well−advised when, in my theory of the inner man, I placed at the foundation of the self, after the seven spheres which the self contains had been successively disengaged, a lowest depth of darkness, the abyss of the un−revealed, the virtual pledge of an infinite future, the obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is incapable of realizing itself in mind, conscience, or reason, in the soul, the heart, the imagination, or the life of the senses, and which makes for itself attributes and conditions out of all these forms of its own life. But the obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty, and the spirit. For it represents resistance —that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.

Amiel's Journal

Resignation comes to us

October 22, 1856.—We must learn to look upon life as an apprenticeship to a progressive renunciation, a perpetual diminution in our pretensions, our hopes, our powers, and our liberty. The circle grows narrower and narrower; we began with being eager to learn everything, to see everything, to tame and conquer everything, and in all directions we reach our limit—non plus ultra. Fortune, glory, love, power, health, happiness, long life, all these blessings which have been possessed by other men seem at first promised and accessible to us, and then we have to put the dream away from us, to withdraw one personal claim after another to make ourselves small and humble, to submit to feel ourselves limited, feeble, dependent, ignorant and poor, and to throw ourselves upon God for all, recognizing our own worthlessness, and that we have no right to anything. It is in this nothingness that we recover something of life—the divine spark is there at the bottom of it. Resignation comes to us, and, in believing love, we reconquer the true greatness.

Amiel's Journal

Idealists with no ideal

The dreamers of ideals – socialists, altruists, and humanitarians of whatever ilk – make me physically sick to my stomach. They're idealists with no ideal, thinkers with no thought. They're enchanted by life's surface because their destiny is to love rubbish, which floats on the water and they think it's beautiful, because scattered shells float on the water too.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 331

Obscure transmutations

Whenever we like it or not we're servants of the hour and its colours, and shapes, we're subjects of the sky and earth. Even these who delve only in themselves, disdaining what surrounds them, delve by different paths when it rains and when it's clear. Obscure transmutations, perhaps felt only in the depths of abstract feelings, occur because it rains or stops raining. They're felt without our feeling them because the weather we didn't feel made itself felt.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 327

Tree of the knowledge of good and evil

That tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Bible is a fine allegory. Is it not intended to signify that when one has penetrated to the depths of things, the consequent loss of illusions brings about the death of the soul— that is to say a complete detachment from all that moves and interests other men?

Chamfort

A Pirandello Play

In a famous Pirandello play (“Six Characters in Search of an Author”), there is a dialogue between a character (fully conscious of its condition as “character”) and the producer (who performs the role of a man in flesh and blood) during which the former expresses its doubts about the so called self-identity of the latter.
Here is the relevant part of that dialogue:

“FATHER (the character): … and once again I ask you in all seriousness; ’Who are you?’
PRODUCER (turning to the Actors in utter amazement, an amazement not unmixed with irritation):
What a cheek the fellow has! A man who calls himself a character comes here and asks me who I am!
FATHER (with dignity, but in no way haughtily): A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has a life which is truly his, marked with his own special characteristics. And as a result he is always somebody! Whilst a man … And I’m not speaking of you personally at the moment … Man in general … can quite well be nobody.
PRODUCER: That may be as it may? But you’re asking me these questions. Me, do you understand? The Producer! The Boss!
FATHER (softly, with gentle humility): But only in order to know if you, you as you really are now, are seeing yourself as, for instance, after all the time that has gone by, you see yourself as you were at some point in the past… With all the illusions that you had then … with everything … all the things you had deep down inside you … everything that made up your external world … everything as it appeared to you then … and as it was, as it was in reality for you then! Well … thinking back on those illusions which you no longer have … on all those things that no longer seem to be what they were once upon a time … don’t you feel that … I won’t say these boards … No! … that the very earth itself is slipping away from under your feet, when you reflect that in the same way this you that you now feel yourself to be … , all your reality as it is today … is destined to seem an illusion tomorrow?
PRODUCER (not having understood much of all this, and somewhat taken aback by this specious argument): Well? And where does all this get us, anyway?
FATHER: Nowhere. I only wanted to make you see that if we (again, pointing to himself and to the other Characters) have no reality outside the world of illusion, it would be as well if you mistrusted your own reality The reality that you breathe and touch today … Because like the reality of yesterday, it is fated to reveal itself as a mere illusion tomorrow.

Contradiction and mystery!

Let there be no falling asleep, no stopping, no attaching yourself to this or that!” This restless feeling is not the need of change. It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what charms me, the unrest of happiness. What a bizarre tendency, and what a strange nature! not to be able to enjoy anything simply, naively, without scruple, to feel a force upon one impelling one to leave the table, for fear the meal should come to an end. Contradiction and mystery! not to use, for fear of abusing; to think one's self obliged to go, not because one has had enough, but because one has stayed awhile. I am indeed always the same; the being who wanders when he need not, the voluntary exile, the eternal traveler, the man incapable of repose, who, driven on by an inward voice, builds nowhere, buys and labors nowhere, but passes, looks, camps, and goes. And is there not another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of void? of incessant pursuit of something wanting? of longing for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbors, friends, relations, I love them all; and so long as these affections are active, they leave in me no room for a sense of want. But yet they do not fill my heart; and that is why they have no power to fix it. I am always waiting for the woman and the work which shall be capable of taking entire possession of my soul, and

of becoming my end and aim.

“Promenant par tout sejour

Le deuil que tu celes,

Psyche−papillon, un jour

Puisses−tu trouver l'amour

Et perdre tes ailes!”

I have not given away my heart: hence this restlessness of spirit. I will not let it be taken captive by that which cannot fill and satisfy it; hence this instinct of pitiless detachment from all that charms me without permanently binding me; so that it seems as if my love of movement, which looks so like inconstancy, was at bottom only a perpetual search, a hope, a desire, and a care, the malady of the ideal.

... Life indeed must always be a compromise between common sense and the ideal, the one abating nothing of its demands, the other accommodating itself to what is practicable and real. But marriage by common sense! arrived at by a bargain! Can it be anything but a profanation? On the other, hand, is that not a vicious ideal which hinders life from completing itself, and destroys the family in germ? Is there not too much of pride in my ideal, pride which will not accept the common destiny?...

Amiel's Journal

Their semi−barbarism

July 1, 1856.—A man and still more a woman, always betrays something of his or her nationality. The women of Russia, for instance, like the lakes and rivers of their native country, seem to be subject to sudden and prolonged fits of torpor. In their movement, undulating and caressing like that of water, there is always a threat of unforeseen frost. The high latitude, the difficulty of life, the inflexibility of their autocratic regime, the heavy and mournful sky, the inexorable climate, all these harsh fatalities have left their mark upon the Muscovite race. A certain somber obstinacy, a kind of primitive ferocity, a foundation of savage harshness which, under the influence of circumstances, might become implacable and pitiless; a cold strength, an indomitable power of resolution which would rather wreck the whole world than yield, the indestructible instinct of the barbarian tribe, perceptible in the half−civilized nation, all these traits are visible to an attentive eye, even in the harmless extravagances and caprices of a young woman of this powerful race. Even in their badinage they betray something of that fierce and rigid nationality which burns its own towns and [as Napoleon said] keeps battalions of dead soldiers on their feet.

What terrible rulers the Russians would be if ever they should spread the night of their rule over the countries of the south! They would bring us a polar despotism, tyranny such as the world has never known, silent as darkness, rigid as ice, insensible as bronze, decked with an outer amiability and glittering with the cold brilliancy of snow, a slavery without compensation or relief. Probably, however, they will gradually lose both the virtues and the defects of their semi−barbarism. The centuries as they pass will ripen these sons of the north, and they will enter into the concert of peoples in some other capacity than as a menace or a dissonance. They have only to transform their hardiness into strength, their cunning into grace, their Muscovitism into humanity, to win love instead of inspiring aversion or fear.

Amiel's Journal

To resign one's self

January 21, 1856.—Yesterday seems to me as far off as though it were last year. My memory holds nothing more of the past than its general plan, just as my eye perceives nothing more in the starry heaven. It is no more possible for me to recover one of my days from the depths of memory than if it were a glass of water poured into a lake; it is not so much a lost thing as a thing melted and fused; the individual has returned into the whole. The divisions of time are categories which have no power to mold my life, and leave no more lasting impression than lines traced by a stick in water. My life, my individuality, are fluid, there is nothing for it but to resign one's self.

Amiel's Journal

These long, slow minutes ...

Most if not all man live a contemptible life: contemptible in all its joys, and contemptible in almost all its sorrows, except those that have to do with death, since Mystery plays a part in these. (...)

And it's extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think of nothing better than these long, slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost of sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And than it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all man live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same water-down life. Whenever I see cat lying in the sun, I think of humanity. Whenever I see someone sleep, I remember that everything is slumber. Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he hes never done anything but dream.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 324-325

To exist is to deny

To exist is to deny. What am I today, but the denial of who and what I was yesterday? To exist is to contradict oneself. Nothing better symbolizes life than those news articles that contradict today what the newspaper said yesterday.

Pessoa

I came to destroy the works of the female

iii. 6. 45. The Lord said to Salome when she inquired: How long shall death prevail? 'As long as ye women bera children', not because life is an ill, and the creation evil: but as showing the sequence of nature: for in all cases birth is followed by decay.

Excerpts from Theodotus, 67. And when the Saviour says to Salome that there shall be death as long as women bear children, he did not say it as abusing birth, for that is necessary for the salvation of believers.

Strom. iii. 9. 63. But those who set themselves against God's creation because of continence, which has a fair-sounding name, quote also those words which were spoken to Salome, of which I made mention before. They are contained, I think (or I take it) in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. For they say that 'the Savior himself said: I came to destroy the works of the female'. By female he means lust: by works, birth and decay.

The serpent of fatality

April 9, 1856.—How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified. What happens is quite different from that we planned; we planned a blessing and there springs from it a curse. How many times the serpent of fatality, or rather the law of life, the force of things, intertwining itself with some very simple facts, cannot be cut away by any effort, and the logic of situations and characters leads inevitably to a dreaded denouement. It is the fatal spell of destiny, which obliges us to feed our grief from our own hand, to prolong the existence of our vulture, to throw into the furnace of our punishment and expiation, our powers, our qualities, our very virtues, one by one, and so forces us to recognize our nothingness, our dependence and the implacable majesty of law. Faith in a providence softens punishment but does not do away with it. The wheels of the divine chariot crush us first of all that justice may be satisfied and an example given to men, and then a hand is stretched out to us to raise us up, or at least to reconcile us with the love hidden under the justice. Pardon cannot precede repentance and repentance only begins with humility. And so long as any fault whatever appears trifling to us, so long as we see, not so much the culpability of as the excuses for imprudence or negligence, so long, in short, as Job murmurs and as providence is thought to be too severe, so long as there is any inner protestation against fate, or doubt as to the perfect justice of God, there is not yet entire humility or true repentance. It is when we accept the expiation that it can be spared us; it is when we submit sincerely that grace can be granted to us. Only when grief finds its work done can God dispense us from it. Trial then only stops when it is useless: that is why it scarcely ever stops. Faith in the justice and love of the Father is the best and indeed the only support under the sufferings of this life. The foundation of all of our pains is unbelief; we doubt whether what happens to us ought to happen to us; we think ourselves wiser than providence, because to avoid fatalism we believe in accident. Liberty in submission—what a problem! And yet that is what we must always come back to.

Amiel's Journal