Dream

From the poets of all ages and from the depths of their souls this tremendous vision of the flowing away of life like water has wrung bitter cries—from Pindar's "dream of a shadow," σκιας οναρ, to Calderón's "life is a dream" and Shakespeare's "we are such stuff as dreams are made on," this last a yet more tragic sentence than Calderón's, for whereas the Castilian only declares that our life is a dream, but not that we ourselves are the dreamers of it, the Englishman makes us ourselves a dream, a dream that dreams.

Unamuno

Tragic sense of life

To Himself (A se stesso)

Now be for ever still,
Weary my heart. For the last cheat is dead,
I thought eternal. Dead. For us, I know
Not only the dear hope
Of being deluded gone, but the desire.
Rest still for ever. You
Have beaten long enough. And to no purpose
Were all your stirrings; earth not worth your sighs.
Boredom and bitterness
Is life; and the rest, nothing; the world is dirt.
Lie quiet now. Despair
For the last time. Fate granted to our kind
Only to die. And now you may despise
Yourself, nature, the brute
Power which, hidden, ordains the common doom,
And all the immeasurable emptiness of things.

 Leopardi

The Infinite

This solitary hill has always been dear to me
And this hedge, which prevents me from seeing most of
The endless horizon.
But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughts
Endless spaces beyond the hedge,
An all encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,
To the point that my heart is almost overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind rustling through the trees
I compare its voice to the infinite silence.
And eternity occurs to me, and all the ages past,
And the present time, and its sound.
Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:
And to founder in this sea is sweet to me.

Count Giacomo Leopardi

Crime of making a man

,,The immorality of procreation praised as conscious is this: here the crime of making a man, to introduce more evil and pain in the world is not made unconsciously in ecstasy and drama in the darkness of copulation, but is coolly premeditated, people then are no longer cautious and repeat the act until they reach the goal. But there is something even worse: artificial procreation, semen ice, where without the manipulator and the belly person horrified by what they do, lacks even the delight that is some extenuating circumstance.''

Guido Ceronetti;  

from: The Silence of the Body

Luís de Camões - SESTINA

Little by little it ebbs, this life
if by any chance I am still alive;
my brief time passes before my eyes;
I mourn the past in whatever I say,
as each day passes, step by step;
youth deserts me; what persists is pain.

And what a bitter variety of pain
that not for an hour in so long a life
could I give evil so much as a side step!
Surely, I’m better dead than alive?
Why complain, at last? What’s more to say,
having failed to be cheated by my own eyes?

Those lovely, gentle and lucid eyes
whose absence caused me as much pain
as her not understanding whatever I say!
If at the end of so long a short life
you should keep the burning ray alive
blessings will attend my every step.

But first I’m aware the ultimate step
must advance to close these sad eyes
love opened to those by which I live.
Pen and ink must witness to the pain
in writing of so troublesome a life
the little I lived through, and the more I say.

Oh, I know not why I write or what I say!
If contemplating yet another step
I envisage a sad version of life
that places no value on such eyes,
I cannot conceive how such pain
could find a pen to declare I’m alive.

In my heart, the embers are still alive;
if they found no relief in what I say
they would now have made ashes of my pain;
but beyond this grief I overstep,
I’m softened by the tears of those eyes
that, though life is fleeting, keep me alive.

I am dying alive;
             in death I live;
I see without eyes;
             tongue-less I speak;
they march in goose step,
             glory and pain.

(Translated by Landeg White)

The Immortals - Hermann Hesse

Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, spasmodic lust;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you evermore residing
In the ether’s star-translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star-bright is our eternal laughter.

To be dependent is to me terrible

April 6, 1851.—Was there ever any one so vulnerable as I? If I were a father how many griefs and vexations, a child might cause me. As a husband I should have a thousand ways of suffering because my happiness demands a thousand conditions I have a heart too easily reached, a too restless imagination; despair is easy to me, and every sensation reverberates again and again within me. What might be, spoils for me what is. What ought to be consumes me with sadness. So the reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have too much imagination, conscience and penetration, and not enough character. The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid.

And yet, at the same time it attracts me; I have need of it. Family life, especially, in all its delightfulness, in all its moral depth, appeals to me almost like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, a common worship, toward the world outside, kindness and beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand and one moral relations which develop round the first, all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes. But I put them aside because every hope is, as it were, an egg whence a serpent may issue instead of a dove, because every joy missed is a stab; because every seed confided to destiny contains an ear of grief which the future may develop.

I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. Everything which compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me to things or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be, all which injures my idea of the perfect man, hurts me mortally, degrades and wounds me in mind, even beforehand. I abhor useless regrets and repentances. The fatality of the consequences which follow upon every human act, the leading idea of dramatic art and the most tragic element of life, arrests me more certainly than the arm of the Commandeur. I only act with regret, and almost by force.

To be dependent is to me terrible; but to depend upon what is irreparable, arbitrary and unforeseen, and above all to be so dependent by my fault and through my own error, to give up liberty and hope, to slay sleep and happiness, this would be hell!

Amiel's Journal

Amiel on Joubert

February 17, 1851.—I have been reading, for six or seven hours without stopping the Pensees of Joubert. I felt at first a very strong attraction toward the book, and a deep interest in it, but I have already a good deal cooled down. These scattered and fragmentary thoughts, falling upon one without a pause, like drops of light, tire, not my head, but reasoning power. The merits of Joubert consist in the grace of the style, the vivacity or finesse of the criticisms, the charm of the metaphors; but he starts many more problems than he solves, he notices and records more than he explains. His philosophy is merely literary and popular; his originality is only in detail and in execution. Altogether, he is a writer of reflections rather than a philosopher, a critic of remarkable gifts, endowed with exquisite sensibility, but, as an intelligence, destitute of the capacity for co−ordination. He wants concentration and continuity. It is not that he has no claims to be considered a philosopher or an artist, but rather that he is both imperfectly, for he thinks and writes marvelously, on a small scale. He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a jeweler, a coiner of sentences, of adages, of criticisms, of aphorisms, counsels, problems; and his book, extracted from the accumulations of his journal during fifty years of his life, is a collection of precious stones, of butterflies, coins and engraved gems. The whole, however, is more subtle than strong, more poetical than profound, and leaves upon the reader rather the impression of a great wealth of small curiosities of value, than of a great intellectual existence and a new point of view. The place of Joubert seems to me then, below and very far from the philosophers and the true poets, but honorable among the moralists and the critics. He is one of those men who are superior to their works, and who have themselves the unity which these lack. This first judgment is, besides, indiscriminate and severe. I shall have to modify it later.

February 20th.—I have almost finished these two volumes of Pensees and the greater part of the Correspondance. This last has especially charmed me; it is remarkable for grace, delicacy, atticism, and precision. The chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are the most insignificant. All that has to do with large views with the whole of things, is very little at Joubert's command; he has no philosophy of history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of detail, and his proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this sphere of the subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling, within the circle of personal affectation and preoccupations, of social and educational interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an Aeolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character of a child, so that we feel for him less admiration than tenderness and gratitude. 

Amiel's Journal

Life is but a tissue of habits

In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

Amiel's Journal

In the service of that which passeth not away.

January 2, 1880.—A sense of rest, of deep quiet even. Silence within and without. A quietly−burning fire. A sense of comfort. The portrait of my mother seems to smile upon me. I am not dazed or stupid, but only happy in this peaceful morning. Whatever may be the charm of emotion, I do not know whether it equals the sweetness of those hours of silent meditation, in which we have a glimpse and foretaste of the contemplative joys of paradise. Desire and fear, sadness and care, are done away. Existence is reduced to the simplest form, the most ethereal mode of being, that is, to pure self−consciousness. It is a state of harmony, without tension and without disturbance, the dominical state of the soul, perhaps the state which awaits it beyond the grave. It is happiness as the orientals understand it, the happiness of the anchorite, who neither struggles nor wishes any more, but simply adores and enjoys. It is difficult to find words in which to express this moral situation, for our languages can only render the particular and localized vibrations of life; they are incapable of expressing this motionless concentration, this divine quietude, this state of the resting ocean, which reflects the sky, and is master of its own profundities. Things are then re−absorbed into their principles; memories are swallowed up in memory; the soul is only soul, and is no longer conscious of itself in its individuality and separateness. It is something which feels the universal life, a sensible atom of the Divine, of God. It no longer appropriates anything to itself, it is conscious of no void. Only the Yogis and Soufis perhaps have known in its profundity this humble and yet voluptuous state, which combines the joys of being and of non−being, which is neither reflection nor will, which is above both the moral existence and the intellectual existence, which is the return to unity, to the pleroma, the vision of Plotinus and of Proclus—Nirvana in its most attractive form.

It is clear that the western nations in general, and especially the Americans, know very little of this state of feeling. For them life is devouring and incessant activity. They are eager for gold, for power, for dominion; their aim is to crush men and to enslave nature. They show an obstinate interest in means, and have not a thought for the end. They confound being with individual being, and the expansion of the self with happiness—that is to say, they do not live by the soul; they ignore the unchangeable and the eternal; they live at the periphery of their being, because they are unable to penetrate to its axis. They are excited, ardent, positive, because they are superficial. Why so much effort, noise, struggle, and greed?—it is all a mere stunning and deafening of the self. When death comes they recognize that it is so—why not then admit it sooner? Activity is only beautiful when it is holy—that is to say, when it is spent in the service of that which passeth not away.

Amiel

These ruins

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins.

Z. Camus

Otto Weininger on celibacy and women

Now for the first time, looking at the woman question as the most important problem of mankind, the demand for the sexual abstinence on the part of both sexes is put forward with good reason. To seek to ground this claim on the prejudicial effects on the health following sexual intercourse would be absurd, for any one with knowledge of the physical frame could upset such a theory at all points; to found it on the immorality of passion would also be wrong, because that would introduce a heteronomous motive into ethics. St. Augustine, however, must certainly have been aware, when he advocated chastity for all mankind, that the objection raised to it would be that in such a case the whole human race would quickly disappear from the face of the earth.

This extraordinary apprehension, the worst part of which appears to be the thought that the race would be exterminated, shows not only the greatest unbelief in individual immortality and eternal life for moral well-doers; it is not only most irreligious, but it proves at the same time the cowardice of man and his incapacity to live an individual life. To any one who thinks thus, the earth can only mean the turmoil and press of those on it; death must seem less terrible to such a man than isolation. If the immortal, moral part of his personality were really vigorous, he would have courage to look this result in the face; he would not fear the death of the body, nor attempt to substitute the miserable certainty of the continuation of the race for his lack of faith in the eternal life of the soul. The rejection of sexuality is merely the death of the physical life, to put in its place the full development of the spiritual life.

Hence it follows that it cannot be a moral duty to provide for the continuance of the race. This common argument appears to me to be so extraordinarily false that I am almost ashamed to meet it. Yet at the risk of making myself ridiculous I must ask if any one ever consummated coitus to avoid the great danger of letting the human race die out, if he failed in his duty? And would it not follow that any man who prefers chastity would be open to the charge of immoral conduct? Every form of fecundity is loathsome, and no one who is honest with himself feels bound to provide for the continuity of the human race. And what we do not realise to be a duty, is not a duty. On the contrary, it is immoral to procreate a human being for any secondary reason, to bring a being into the limitations of humanity, the conditions made for him by his parentage; the fundamental reason why the possible freedom and spontaneity of a human being is limited is that he was begotten in such an immoral fashion. That the human race should persist is of no interest whatever to reason; he who would perpetuate humanity would perpetuate the problem and the guilt, the only problem and the only guilt. The only true goal is divinity and the union of humanity with the Godhead; that is the real choice between good and evil, between existence and negation. The moral sanction that has been invented for coitus, in supposing that there is an ideal attitude to the act in which only the propogation of the race is thought of, is no sufficient defence. There is no such imperative in the mind of man; it is merely an ingenious defence of a desire, and there is the fundamental immorality in it, that the being to be created has no power of choice with regard to his parents. As for the sexual union in which the production of children is prevented, there is no possible justification.

Sexual union has no place in the idea of mankind, not because ascetism is a duty, but because in it woman becomes the object, the cause, and man does what he will with her, looks upon her merely as a “thing,” not as a living human being with an inner, psychic, existence. And so man despises woman the moment coitus is over, and the woman knows that she is despised, even although a few minutes before she thought herself adored.

The only thing to be respected in man is the idea of mankind; this disparagement of woman (and himself), induced by coitus, is the surest proof that it is opposed to that idea of mankind. Any one who is ignorant of what this Kantian “idea of mankind” means, may perhaps understand it when he thinks of his sisters, his mother, his female relatives; it concerns them all: for our own sakes, then, woman ought to be treated as human, respected and not degraded, all sexuality implying degradation.

But man can only respect woman when she herself ceases to wish to be object and material for man; if there is any question of emancipation it should be the emancipation from the prostitute element. It has never until now been made clear where the bondage of woman lies; it is in the sovereign, all too welcome power wielded on them by the Phallus. There can be no doubt that the men who have really desired the true emancipation of women are the men who are not very sexual, who have no great craving for love, who are not very profound, but who are men of noble and spiritual minds. I am not going to try to palliate the erotic motives of man, nor to represent his antipathy to the “emancipated woman” as being in any sense less than it is; it is much easier to go with the majority, than, as Kant did, to climb, painfully and slowly, to the heights of isolation.

But a great deal of what is taken for enmity to emancipation is due to the want of confidence in its possibility. Man does not really want woman as a slave: he is usually only too anxious for a companion. The education which the woman of the present day receives is not calculated to fit her for the battle against her real bondage. The last resource of her “womanly” teacher, if she declines to do this or that, is to say that no man will have her unless she does it. Women's education is directed solely to preparing them for marriage, the happy state in which they are to find their crown.

Such training would have little effect on man, but it serves to accentuate woman's womanishness, her dependence, and her servile condition. The education of woman must be taken out of the hands of woman; the education of mankind must be taken out of the hands of the mother. This is the first step towards placing woman in a relation to the idea of mankind, which since the beginning she has done more than anything else to hinder.

*
A woman who had really given up her sexual self, who wished to be at peace would be no longer “woman.” She would have ceased to be “woman,” she would have received the inward and spiritual sign as well as the outward form of regeneration. Can such a thing be?

There is no absolute woman, but even to say “yes” to the above question is like giving one's assent to a miracle. Emancipation will not make woman happier; it will not ensure her salvation, and it is a long road which leads to God. No being in the transition stage between freedom and slavery can be happy. But will woman choose to abandon slavery in order to become unhappy? The question is not merely if it is possible for woman to become moral. It is this: is it possible for woman really to wish to realize the problem of existence, the conception of guilt? Can she really desire freedom? This can happen only by her being penetrated by an ideal, brought to the guiding star. It can happen only if the categorical imperative were to become active in woman; only if woman can place herself in relation to the moral idea, the idea of humanity.

In that way only can there be an emancipation of woman.


Sex and character p. 210-212

Crowds termed criminal crowds

Crowds termed criminal crowds—A crowd may be legally yet not psychologically criminal—The absolute unconsciousness of the acts of crowds—Various examples—Psychology of the authors of the September massacres—Their reasoning, their sensibility, their ferocity, and their morality.



Owing to the fact that crowds, after a period of excitement, enter upon a purely automatic and unconscious state, in which they are guided by suggestion, it seems difficult to qualify them in any case as criminal. I only retain this erroneous qualification because it has been definitely brought into vogue by recent psychological investigations. Certain acts of crowds are assuredly criminal, if considered merely in themselves, but criminal in that case in the same way as the act of a tiger devouring a Hindoo, after allowing its young to maul him for their amusement.

The usual motive of the crimes of crowds is a powerful suggestion, and the individuals who take part in such crimes are afterwards convinced that they have acted in obedience to duty, which is far from being the case with the ordinary criminal.

The history of the crimes committed by crowds illustrates what precedes.

The murder of M. de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, may be cited as a typical example. After the taking of the fortress the governor, surrounded by a very excited crowd, was dealt blows from every direction. It was proposed to hang him, to cut off his head, to tie him to a horse's tail. While struggling, he accidently kicked one of those present. Some one proposed, and his suggestion was at once received with acclamation by the crowd, that the individual who had been kicked should cut the governor's throat.

"The individual in question, a cook out of work, whose chief reason for being at the Bastille was idle curiosity as to what was going on, esteems, that since such is the general opinion, the action is patriotic and even believes he deserves a medal for having destroyed a monster. With a sword that is lent him he strikes the bared neck, but the weapon being somewhat blunt and not cutting, he takes from his pocket a small black-handled knife and (in his capacity of cook he would be experienced in cutting up meat) successfully effects the operation."

The working of the process indicated above is clearly seen in this example. We have obedience to a suggestion, which is all the stronger because of its collective origin, and the murderer's conviction that he has committed a very meritorious act, a conviction the more natural seeing that he enjoys the unanimous approval of his fellow-citizens. An act of this kind may be considered crime legally but not psychologically.

The general characteristics of criminal crowds are precisely the same as those we have met with in all crowds: openness to suggestion, credulity, mobility, the exaggeration of the sentiments good or bad, the manifestation of certain forms of morality, &c.

We shall find all these characteristics present in a crowd which has left behind it in French history the most sinister memories—the crowd which perpetrated the September massacres. In point of fact it offers much similarity with the crowd that committed the Saint Bartholomew massacres. I borrow the details from the narration of M. Taine, who took them from contemporary sources.

It is not known exactly who gave the order or made the suggestion to empty the prisons by massacring the prisoners. Whether it was Danton, as is probable, or another does not matter; the one interesting fact for us is the powerful suggestion received by the crowd charged with the massacre.

The crowd of murderers numbered some three hundred persons, and was a perfectly typical heterogeneous crowd. With the exception of a very small number of professional scoundrels, it was composed in the main of shopkeepers and artisans of every trade: bootmakers, locksmiths, hairdressers, masons, clerks, messengers, &c. Under the influence of the suggestion received they are perfectly convinced, as was the cook referred to above, that they are accomplishing a patriotic duty. They fill a double office, being at once judge and executioner, but they do not for a moment regard themselves as criminals.

Deeply conscious of the importance of their duty, they begin by forming a sort of tribunal, and in connection with this act the ingenuousness of crowds and their rudimentary conception of justice are seen immediately. In consideration of the large number of the accused, it is decided that, to begin with, the nobles, priests, officers, and members of the king's household—in a word, all the individuals whose mere profession is proof of their guilt in the eyes of a good patriot—shall be slaughtered in a body, there being no need for a special decision in their case. The remainder shall be judged on their personal appearance and their reputation. In this way the rudimentary conscience of the crowd is satisfied. It will now be able to proceed legally with the massacre, and to give free scope to those instincts of ferocity whose genesis I have set forth elsewhere, they being instincts which collectivities always have it in them to develop to a high degree. These instincts, however—as is regularly the case in crowds—will not prevent the manifestation of other and contrary sentiments, such as a tenderheartedness often as extreme as the ferocity.

"They have the expansive sympathy and prompt sensibility of the Parisian working man. At the Abbaye, one of the federates, learning that the prisoners had been left without water for twenty-six hours, was bent on putting the gaoler to death, and would have done so but for the prayers of the prisoners themselves. When a prisoner is acquitted (by the improvised tribunal) every one, guards and slaughterers included, embraces him with transports of joy and applauds frantically," after which the wholesale massacre is recommenced. During its progress a pleasant gaiety never ceases to reign. There is dancing and singing around the corpses, and benches are arranged "for the ladies," delighted to witness the killing of aristocrats. The exhibition continues, moreover, of a special description of justice.

A slaughterer at the Abbaye having complained that the ladies placed at a little distance saw badly, and that only a few of those present had the pleasure of striking the aristocrats, the justice of the observation is admitted, and it is decided that the victims shall be made to pass slowly between two rows of slaughterers, who shall be under the obligation to strike with the back of the sword only so as to prolong the agony. At the prison de la Force the victims are stripped stark naked and literally "carved" for half an hour, after which, when every one has had a good view, they are finished off by a blow that lays bare their entrails.

The slaughterers, too, have their scruples and exhibit that moral sense whose existence in crowds we have already pointed out. They refuse to appropriate the money and jewels of the victims, taking them to the table of the committees.

Those rudimentary forms of reasoning, characteristic of the mind of crowds, are always to be traced in all their acts. Thus, after the slaughter of the 1,200 or 1,500 enemies of the nation, some one makes the remark, and his suggestion is at once adopted, that the other prisons, those containing aged beggars, vagabonds, and young prisoners, hold in reality useless mouths, of which it would be well on that account to get rid. Besides, among them there should certainly be enemies of the people, a woman of the name of Delarue, for instance, the widow of a poisoner: "She must be furious at being in prison, if she could she would set fire to Paris: she must have said so, she has said so. Another good riddance." The demonstration appears convincing, and the prisoners are massacred without exception, included in the number being some fifty children of from twelve to seventeen years of age, who, of course, might themselves have become enemies of the nation, and of whom in consequence it was clearly well to be rid.

At the end of a week's work, all these operations being brought to an end, the slaughterers can think of reposing themselves. Profoundly convinced that they have deserved well of their country, they went to the authorities and demanded a recompense. The most zealous went so far as to claim a medal.

The history of the Commune of 1871 affords several facts analogous to those which precede. Given the growing influence of crowds and the successive capitulations before them of those in authority, we are destined to witness many others of a like nature.

Gustav Le Bon

Angelus Silesius - Time

Eternity is time And time eternity, Except when we ourselves. Would make them different be.

Things in eternity Are all at once in prime, No after nor before Is there, as here in time.

Who would expect it so? From darkness light is brought, Life rises out of Death, and Something comes from Naught.

Two eyes our souls possess: While one is turned on time, The other seeth things Eternal and sublime.

My heart below is strait, On top 't is wide and stout. It must have room for God. But earthly things keep out.

O Christian once thou must Down into Hell be led. If not while still in life, Thou must go down when dead.

Trust me, my friend, if God Should bid me not to dwell In heaven, I'd stay here Or go, as lief, to Hell.

When quitting time, I am Myself eternity. I shall be one with God, God one with me shall be.

What did eternal God Before time had begun? He loved Himself and thus Begot He God, the Son.

What you for others wish, You for yourself suggest. If you don't wish them well, Your own death you request.

A soul redeemed and blessed No more knows otherhood. It is with God one light And one beatitude.

In Heaven life is good: No-one has aught alone. What one possesses, there All others too will own.

Plurality God loathes, Therefore He has decreed That all men should in Christ Be only one indeed.

Beware man of thyself, Self's burden thou wilt rue. It will impair thee more, Than thousand devils do.

Three enemies has man: Himself, Satan, the world; The first will be the last That to the ground is hurled.

Were e'en in Christ himself, Some little will at all, However blessed he be, Surely from grace he'd fall.

The highest worship is Like unto God to grow, Christlike to be in life, In habit, and love's glow.

Like unto Christ is he Who truly loves his foe, For persecutors prays, And renders good for woe.

Progress & Progressives

Science’s greatest triumph appears to lie in the increasing speed with which an idiot can transport his idiocy from one place to another.

The intelligent leftist admits that his generation will not construct the perfect society, but trusts in a future generation.
His intelligence discovers his personal impotence, but his leftism prevents him from discovering man’s impotence.

Tolerance consists of a firm decision to allow them to insult everything we seek to love and respect, as long as they do not threaten our material comforts.
Modern, liberal, democratic, progressive man, as long as they do not step on his calluses, will let them degrade his soul. 
 
The left never attributes its failure to a mistaken diagnosis but to the perversity of events.

Social problems are the favorite refuge of those fleeing their own problems.
Progress in the end comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what degrades him.

Denigrating progress is too easy. I aspire to the professorship in methodical regression.

Progress is the scourge God has chosen for us.

The failure of progress has not consisted in the non-fulfillment but in the fulfillment of its promises.

The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.
For the fool, obsolete opinion and erroneous opinion are synonymous expressions.

In the end, what does modern man call “Progress”?
Whatever seems convenient to the fool.

A progressive defends Progress by saying that it exists.
The murderer also exists, and the judge condemns him.

A greater capacity for killing is the criterion of “progress” between two peoples or two epochs.

Resistance is futile when everything in the world is conspiring to destroy what we admire.
We are always left, however, with an incorruptible soul, so that we might contemplate, judge, and disdain.

An “ideal society” would be the graveyard of human greatness.

"Renouncing the world" ceases to be an achievement and becomes a temptation as Progress progresses.
It is indecent, and even obscene, to speak to man of “progress,” when every path winds its way up between funerary cypresses.

The only possible progress is the internal progress of each individual.
A process that concludes with the end of each life.

We can only hope for a reform of society to come from the contradictions between human follies.

In order to avoid a manly confrontation with nothingness, man erects altars to progress.

What is called progress are preparations for a catastrophe.

The left’s theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them.

Progress is the offspring of knowledge of nature.
Faith in progress is the offspring of ignorance of history.

As a criterion of what is best, modern man knows nothing but posteriority.

The progressive’s cardinal syllogism is simply beautiful: the best always triumphs, because what triumphs is called the best.

More repulsive than the future which progressives involuntarily prepare is the future they dream of.

Chance will always rule history, because it is not possible to organize the state in such a way that it does not matter who rules.

In order to renew, it is not necessary to contradict; it is enough to make profounder.

Unlimited gullibility is required to be able to believe that any social condition can be improved in any other way than slowly, gradually, and involuntarily.

Social improvements do not come from powerful shake-ups, but from light nudges.

The golden rule of politics is to make only minimal changes and to make them as slowly as possible.

It does not appear that the humanities, in contrast to the natural sciences, reach a state of maturity where anything idiotic is automatically obvious.

Religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper.

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

Reason, Progress, and Justice are the three theological virtues of the fool.

Asking the state to do what only society should do is the error of the left.

The leftist, like the polemicist of yesteryear, believes he refutes an opinion by accusing the holder of that opinion of immorality.

The vice which afflicts the right is cynicism, and that which afflicts the left is deceit.

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists.

The progressive believes that everything soon becomes obsolete, except his ideas.

The periodic reflowering of what he decrees obsolete makes life bitter for the progressive.

Progress ages badly.
Each generation brings a new model of progressivism and discards with contempt the previous model.
Nothing is more grotesque than yesterday’s progressive.

The frightened progressive has neither compassion nor dignity.

Nothing is more dangerous than to solve ephemeral problems with permanent solutions.

To reform everyone else is an ambition which all mock yet which all nurse. .

The left is a collection of those who blame society for nature’s shabby treatment of them.

Knowing which reforms the world needs is the only unequivocal symptom of stupidity.

The problems of an “underdeveloped” country are the favorite pretext for leftist escapism.
Lacking new merchandise to offer to the European market, the leftist intellectual peddles his faded wares in the third world.

The left does not condemn violence until it hears it pounding on its door.

The individual today rebels against immutable human nature so that he might refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

The preaching of progressives has so corrupted us that nobody believes that he is what he is, but only what he did not succeed in being.

Modern man already knows that political solutions are ludicrous and suspects that economic solutions are too.

Transforming the world: the occupation of a convict resigned to his punishment.

They speak emphatically of “transforming the world,” when the most to which they can aspire is to certain secondary remodelings of society.

Two hundred years ago it was permissible to trust in the future without being totally stupid.
But today, who can believe in the current prophecies, since we are yesterday’s splendid future?

The leftist emulates the devout who continue venerating the relic after the miracle has been proved to be a hoax.

The new left gathers together those who acknowledge the ineffectiveness of the cure without ceasing to believe in the prescription.

Nothing cures the progressive.
Not even the frequent panic attacks administered to him by progress.

The progressive’s enthusiasm, the democrat’s arguments, the materialist’s demonstrations are the reactionary’s delicious and succulent food.

Consumption, for the progressive, is justified only as a means of production.

The new catechists profess that Progress is the modern incarnation of hope.
But Progress is not hope emerging, but the dying echo of hope already vanished.

In the intelligent man faith is the only remedy for anguish.
The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, work.

The most persuasive reason to renounce daring progressive opinions is the inevitability with which sooner or later the fool finally adopts them.

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

When it finishes its “ascent,” humanity will find tedium waiting for it, seated on the highest peak.

Yesterday progressivism captured the unwary by offering them freedom; today all it needs to do is offer them food.

Under the pretext of giving work to the hungry, the progressive sells the useless artifacts he produces.
The poor are industrialism’s pretext for enriching the rich man.

Leftists and rightists merely argue about who is to have possession of industrial society.
The reactionary longs for its death.

The crisis of Christianity today has been provoked not by science, nor by history, but by the new means of communication.
Religious progressivism is the task of adapting Christian doctrines to the opinions sponsored by news agencies and publicity agents.

The modern Christian feels professionally obligated to act jovially and jokingly, to show his teeth in a cheerful grin, to profess a slavering friendliness, in order to prove to the unbeliever that Christianity is not a “somber” religion, a “pessimistic” doctrine, an “ascetic” morality.
The progressive Christian shakes our hand with the wide grin of a politician running for office.

To fail at being a failure

E.M. Cioran’s work indicates the caustic philosophical consequences of sleepless rumination upon insignificance and failure. It is thick with anxiety, but retains buoyancy, the sick humour of sneering into the abyss. For a generation allied by smug cynicism and chic nihilism, to encounter a space of understanding free of the sour stench of complaint might be palliative! It could correct the posture, provide iron to the will, destroy some friendships, and it might well be a taste of joy, a flicker of warmth… at the very least, it might mortify those prone to complaint…

Cioran was a Romanian born philosopher mystic who honed his craft in French, known for sharp edged aphorisms, fragments, recalling Nietzsche’s Daybreak. His was the bleak philosophy of insomnia, horrific laboring through late hours, candid lamentations of his very birth, his eyes drooping down his skull, a cigarette sizzling against an open sore. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche states “the thought of suicide is a strong consolation; one can get through many a bad night with it.” Cioran’s entire oeuvre can be seen as exploring this sentiment.

In 2012, a number of his books were published in fine editions. Anathemas and Admirations collects two of his books, Exercise d’admiration and Aveux et anathèmes. The resulting combination allies a series of literary essays – the admirations of a wide range of writers including Borges, Beckett, Fitzgerald – alongside clusters of confessional aphorisms:


“To have nothing more in common with men than the fact of being a man!”

“One can imagine everything, predict everything, save for how long one can sink.”

Cioran’s admirations offer intimate curmudgeonly affection on other writers, and are exemplary accounts of his method and approach. For instance, in Some Meetings, Cioran offers moments of intimacy with Beckett which reveal as much about Beckett’s saintly detachment as Cioran’s brooding disgust: “he disparages no one, unaware of the hygienic function of malevolence.” For reference points on other literary admirations, Henry Miller’s love letter to himself in the guise of a study of Rimbaud and Nick Land’s deranged engagement with Bataille both come to mind in the sense that they eschew the deft theoretical engagement of masters like Blanchot for a biographical confession of obsession and ruin.

I’d like to discuss one of these admirations in depth, because it reveals much about Cioran’s work, because it is a timely reflection, because it is a great essay worth discussion. Fitzgerald: The Pascalian Experience Of An American Novelist would make a great companion piece to the recent Luhrmann production of The Great Gatsby. An indication of the decline in Fitzgerald’s interpretation and cultural value. A kind of how-to-read Fitzgerald, hardening the resolve of teens forced to endure limp scholastic interpretations. Imagine a generation of lit-thugs interpreting Gatsby through Cioran instead of Luhrmann! Cinemas ablaze, Dicaprio holed up in some secure locale offering daily apologies to the world via twitter, his fatwah anguish consoled by Rushdie. Given the resurgence in interest in Fitzgerald’s work, the publication of Anathemas and Admirations is fortuitous!

In 1955, when Cioran’s essay was written, Fitzgerald was dead 15 years. He’d drank himself to death after his wife, Zelda, was institutionalized as a schizophrenic. His degradation was preserved in intimate detail in a series of essays he wrote long before his death, between 1935-1936, collected as The Crack-Up. He was forty years old and experiencing his bout of lucidity, the consequence of a crash after seven years of alcoholic, hedonistic excess. In these essays, Fitzgerald attempts to locate his experience within the general tumult of his Lost Generation, dismissed by Cioran as a complacent gesture. Where Cioran finds value is precisely that very specific and very personal experience of ruin that Fitzgerald expresses: “they partake of an essence, of an intensity, that transcends contingencies and continents.”

Cioran’s admiration of Fitzgerald opens with a study of two experiences of lucidity: innate lucidity as graceful immanence, and lucidity developed as an affliction, experienced as a curse. Fitzgerald’s struggle with developed lucidity is established with a quote from The Crack-Up that presents failure as a response to trauma felt long after the event, a kind of corruptive cancer. Cioran expresses his regard for this Fitzgerald, and asserts that The Crack-Up is no mere curio of the degradation of a populist author, but the only piece of literature of Fitzgerald’s worth considering a success.

It is immediately clear that Cioran does not find merit in any of Fitzgerald’s highly regarded novels, including Tender Is The Night and The Great Gatsby, stating that he found it “incomprehensible” that T.S. Eliot could have read the latter three times! Cioran cites with grave distaste the private correspondence of the young, successful Fitzgerald as evidence of pandering desperation and need for approbation. The inference is that this desperation affected the quality of Fitzgerald’s novels. A tenuous inference, one entirely appropriate from Cioran, an impulsive contrarian that snubbed at constructing arguments but reveled in hurling fragments of sense into a void of nonsense. It does not weaken the essay, but establishes a kind of protective intimacy between Cioran and the suffering Fitzgerald. Those in need of a consistent line of argument would shrink at Cioran, apparently regarded in an uncredited quote on the book jacked as “the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche”…

Success achieved without toil is soporific. It smothers the instincts with validation and reward. Fitzgerald’s success reduced his existence to a waking slumber. To wake from a long sleep is to enter a state of confusion. Fitzgerald was confronted by his inability to do much more than be intoxicated, both in the sense of having his senses gratified and in the sense of being fucked up. Cioran examines Fitzgerald’s night visions and anxiety at being unable to return to the shade, living in a dream, without illusions of God to provide him comfort in his respite from respite. The fruit of Fitzgerald’s nocturnal introspection is bitter, a journal of decay. This is to Cioran’s taste, acceding to the sick their productive purpose is to be sick to the limitations of experience, to lick the ground with gratitude for being the only thing lower.

Fitzgerald mopes that insomnia robbed him of mental clarity and the capacity to reflect why he’d “become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.” Cioran defines sickness in distinction to the compulsion of health: to be an object, to be propelled and compelled as an expression of unrestrained will. The sick see their suffering and indignity in the world around them, a solipsism that reads into all reality an expression of one’s horrors or compassions: “to be sick is to coincide totally with oneself”. The sick are incapable of being an object, and are incapable of action. To act is to partake in the unsympathetic field of objects engaged in motion. Self pity condemns action, regards the self as unclean or faulty, and glorifies capitulation, depression, death. Self pity does all this, and it does this to keep one sane, to keep one in the throes of reason. It’s the final expression of self preservation by those who have deprived life of all value and worth.

The Crack-Up, then, should be interpreted as the literary expression of self pity. It reads like a deflated Hamlet if you cut the final act and present Hamlet, his face caught in a pained grin, sharing wine with his new father and laughing over some crass sexual remark. There is no redemption, but defeat and retreat: “his crises would lead him not to mysticism or a final despair or suicide, but to disillusion.”

To disillusion, and to Hollywood.

Fitzgerald’s admirers deplored his descent into hell and subsequent reflections as having “spoiled his literary career,” to which Cioran counters that we must only deplore that he was not equal to the task of being loyal to his failure, to explore it to its nadir, to fail and to fail again. Cioran compares the suffering of Fitzgerald to the suffering of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Dos, finding Fitzgerald’s worth is only in that he was incapable of facing up to the horrific truths that he’d stumbled upon in his season in hell. The Crack Up indicates that Fitzgerald failed at being a failure, and for Cioran this is his sole literary value, concluding “it is a second-order mind that cannot choose between literature and the ‘real dark night of the soul.’”

Janice Lee

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“The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeemer's proclamation, “it is the letter which killeth”—after his protest against a dead symbolism. The new religion is so profound that it is not understood even now, and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of Christians. The person of Christ is the center of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell—all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus*, I think, said, “the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

* [Footnote: Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes Soheffler, the German seventeenth century hymn−writer, whose tender and mystical verses have been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth's translations in the Lyra Germanica.]

Amiel's Journal

translation: Mrs Humphrey Ward

Nothing

The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.

Samuel Beckett: from Watt

To live is a continuous humiliation

To live is a continuous humiliation. Man was born with the desire to be free, yet everywhere he is in the hopeless shackles of mortality and of iron natural law. If Lucifer was proud, he was not so proud as I: it wounds my self-esteem not to be able to perform miracles, to move mountains, to play fast and loose with base clay, to be in direct telepathic rapport with the universe and its beauty. No one more than I could be readier to listen eagerly and encouragingly to the claims of Spiritualists and Christian Scientists. These claims do not surprise me. What does surprise me is that, as touching miracles, the evidence still seems to be on the side of David Hume. I ask myself, “What is the secret of the universe?” and I am staggered to find that I do not know. What an amazing thing it is that no one knows. “Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,” yet is man “successive unto nothing but patrimony of a little mould and entail of four planks.” That bumble-bee in the fox-glove yonder — how can I be about my human business until I know? Who is going to be busied over anything at all so long as overhead the sun shines unmolested and underneath his feet, secure in mystery, grows a single blade of grass? To be alive is so incredible that I can no more than lie still on my back between the immense vertical heights of my ignorance like a newborn babe sunk in the grand canon of Colorado. In the embrace of this mother Sphinx the earth, my own individuality shrinks to vanishing-point, I see myself through the wrong end of a telescope — a tiny speck crawling on a great hill.

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” (Pascal.)

W. N. P. Barbellion 

April 11, 1915

This maxim of egoism ...

Our constant discontent is for the most part rooted in the impulse of self-preservation. This passes into a kind of selfishness, and makes a duty out of the maxim that we should always fix our minds upon what we lack, so that we may endeavour to procure it. Thus it is that we are always intent on finding out what we want, and on thinking of it; but that maxim allows us to overlook undisturbed the things which we already possess; and so, as soon as we have obtained anything, we give it much less attention than before. We seldom think of what we have, but always of what we lack.

This maxim of egoism, which has, indeed, its advantages in procuring the means to the end in view, itself concurrently destroys the ultimate end, namely, contentment; like the bear in the fable that throws a stone at the hermit to kill the fly on his nose. We ought to wait until need and privation announce themselves, instead of looking for them. Minds that are naturally content do this, while hypochondrists do the reverse.

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

Porcupines

A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only tolerable condition of intercourse, is the code of politeness and fine manners; and those who transgress it are roughly told--in the English phrase--_to keep their distance_. By this arrangement the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

All the world's a stage ...

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.

Exactly! Independently of what a man really is in himself, he has a part to play, which fate has imposed upon him from without, by determining his rank, education, and circumstances. The most immediate application of this truth appears to me to be that in life, as on the stage, we must distinguish between the actor and his part; distinguish, that is, the man in himself from his position and reputation--- from the part which rank and circumstances have imposed upon him. How often it is that the worst actor plays the king, and the best the beggar! This may happen in life, too; and a man must be very _crude_ to confuse the actor with his part.

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

Every happiness that a man enjoys, rest upon illusion

Every happiness that a man enjoys, and almost every friendship that he cherishes, rest upon illusion; for, as a rule, with increase of knowledge they are bound to vanish. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere, a man should courageously pursue truth, and never weary of striving to settle accounts with himself and the world. No matter what happens to the right or to the left of him,--be it a chimaera or fancy that makes him happy, let him take heart and go on, with no fear of the desert which widens to his view. Of one thing only must he be quite certain: that under no circumstances will he discover any lack of worth in himself when the veil is raised; the sight of it would be the Gorgon that would kill him. Therefore, if he wants to remain undeceived, let him in his inmost being feel his own worth. For to feel the lack of it is not merely the greatest, but also the only true affliction; all other sufferings of the mind may not only be healed, but may be immediately relieved, by the secure consciousness of worth. The man who is assured of it can sit down quietly under sufferings that would otherwise bring him to despair; and though he has no pleasures, no joys and no friends, he can rest in and on himself; so powerful is the comfort to be derived from a vivid consciousness of this advantage; a comfort to be preferred to every other earthly blessing. Contrarily, nothing in the world can relieve a man who knows his own worthlessness; all that he can do is to conceal it by deceiving people or deafening them with his noise; but neither expedient will serve him very long.

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

If a man is intelligent, he feels pain doubly

"Personality is the element of the greatest happiness." Since _pain_ and _boredom_ are the two chief enemies of human happiness, nature has provided our personality with a protection against both. We can ward off pain, which is more often of the mind than of the body, by _cheerfulness_; and boredom by _intelligence_. But neither of these is akin to the other; nay, in any high degree they are perhaps incompatible. As Aristotle remarks, genius is allied to melancholy; and people of very cheerful disposition are only intelligent on the surface. The better, therefore, anyone is by nature armed against one of these evils, the worse, as a rule, is he armed against the other.

There is no human life that is free from pain and boredom; and it is a special favour on the part of fate if a man is chiefly exposed to the evil against which nature has armed him the better; if fate, that is, sends a great deal of pain where there is a very cheerful temper in which to bear it, and much leisure where there is much intelligence, but not _vice versa_. For if a man is intelligent, he feels pain doubly or trebly; and a cheerful but unintellectual temper finds solitude and unoccupied leisure altogether unendurable.

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

The sublime melancholy

The sublime melancholy which leads us to cherish a lively conviction of the worthlessness of everything of all pleasures and of all mankind, and therefore to long for nothing, but to feel that life is merely a burden which must be borne to an end that cannot be very distant, is a much happier state of mind than any condition of desire, which, be it never so cheerful, would have us place a value on the illusions of the world, and strive to attain them.

This is a fact which we learn from experience; and it is clear, _a priori_, that one of these is a condition of illusion, and the other of knowledge.
Whether it is better to marry or not to marry is a question which in very many cases amounts to this: Are the cares of love more endurable than the anxieties of a livelihood?

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

Friends

Nothing betrays less knowledge of humanity than to suppose that, if a man has a great many friends, it is a proof of merit and intrinsic value: as though men gave their friendship according to value and merit! as though they were not, rather, just like dogs, which love the person that pats them and gives them bits of meat, and never trouble themselves about anything else! The man who understands how to pat his fellows best, though they be the nastiest brutes,--that's the man who has many friends.

It is the converse that is true. Men of great intellectual worth, or, still more, men of genius, can have only very few friends; for their clear eye soon discovers all defects, and their sense of rectitude is always being outraged afresh by the extent and the horror of them. It is only extreme necessity that can compel such men not to betray their feelings, or even to stroke the defects as if they were beautiful additions. Personal love (for we are not speaking of the reverence which is gained by authority) cannot be won by a man of genius, unless the gods have endowed him with an indestructible cheerfulness of temper, a glance that makes the world look beautiful, or unless he has succeeded by degrees in taking men exactly as they are; that is to say, in making a fool of the fools, as is right and proper. On the heights we must expect to be solitary.

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

Absent - present

I observed once to Goethe, in complaining of the illusion and vanity of life, that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied: "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself."

Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders

Noise

Kant wrote a treatise on _The Vital Powers_. I should prefer to write a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true--nay, a great many people--who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of an opportunity.

This aversion to noise I should explain as follows: If you cut up a large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers, loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, its attention distracted and drawn off from the matter in hand; for its superiority depends upon its power of concentration--of bringing all its strength to bear upon one theme, in the same way as a concave mirror collects into one point all the rays of light that strike upon it. Noisy interruption is a hindrance to this concentration. That is why distinguished minds have always shown such an extreme dislike to disturbance in any form, as something that breaks in upon and distracts their thoughts. Above all have they been averse to that violent interruption that comes from noise. Ordinary people are not much put out by anything of the sort. The most sensible and intelligent of all nations in Europe lays down the rule, _Never Interrupt_! as the eleventh commandment. Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful. Occasionally it happens that some slight but constant noise continues to bother and distract me for a time before I become distinctly conscious of it. All I feel is a steady increase in the labor of thinking--just as though I were trying to walk with a weight on my foot. At last I find out what it is. Let me now, however, pass from genus to species. The most inexcusable and disgraceful of all noises is the cracking of whips--a truly infernal thing when it is done in the narrow resounding streets of a town. I denounce it as making a peaceful life impossible; it puts an end to all quiet thought. That this cracking of whips should be allowed at all seems to me to show in the clearest way how senseless and thoughtless is the nature of mankind. No one with anything like an idea in his head can avoid a feeling of actual pain at this sudden, sharp crack, which paralyzes the brain, rends the thread of reflection, and murders thought. Every time this noise is made, it must disturb a hundred people who are applying their minds to business of some sort, no matter how trivial it may be; while on the thinker its effect is woeful and disastrous, cutting his thoughts asunder, much as the executioner's axe severs the head from the body. No sound, be it ever so shrill, cuts so sharply into the brain as this cursed cracking of whips; you feel the sting of the lash right inside your head; and it affects the brain in the same way as touch affects a sensitive plant, and for the same length of time.

Arthur Schopenhauer

(Translated by T. Bailey Saunders)

How can you be so … so …

Cynical?

I didn’t want to say it.

You won’t offend me, I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that’s just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.

In that case, let me ask: What did you feel that night, when you had not yet acquired that … I would not say cynicism so much as irony to maintain you detachment? The irony with which, after all, you came face to face with death? Weren’t you afraid?

I probably was, but I no longer recall. What was much more important, though, was a kind of recognition that I managed to formulate many years later in “Fiasco”: “I grasped the simple secret of the universe that had been disclosed to me: I could be gunned down anywhere, at any time.”

A devastating realization.

Yes, and yet also not. You know, it is not so easy to dampen the joie de vivre of a fourteen-year-old boy, especially if he is surrounded by pals of the same age who are sharing his fate. There is a … an unspoiled innocence about him that protects him from a sense of being completely defenseless, completely without hope. In that sense, an adult can be broken much more quickly.

Is that perception based on your own experiences, or is it something you heard or read about later on?

It was something that I both observed for myself and also read about. Look, let’s be frank here. Among the masses of books on the subject on the same sort of subject only very few are truly able genuinely to put into words the unparalleled experience of being in the Nazi death camps. And it is perhaps the essays of Jean Améry that say the most, even among those exceptional authors. He has a superbly precise word: Weltvertrauen, which I would translate as “trust in the world.” Well, he writes about how hard it is to live without that trust, and once a person has lost it he is condemned to perpetual solitude among people. A person like that will never again be able to see fellow men but only ever anti-men (Mitmenschen and Gegenmenschen are the original expressions). That trust was beaten out of Améry by the Gestapo when he was tortured in Fort Breendonk, a Belgian fort that was set up as a prison. In vain did he survive Auschwitz; decades later he carried out the sentence on himself by committing suicide.

This excerpt is drawn from “Dossier K,” by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson, to be published by Melville House on May 7, 2013.

***

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don’t want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It’s something relative to the past and the future.
It’s a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don’t want to include time in my scheme.
I don’t want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.
I don’t want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.

I shouldn’t even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can’t think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn’t a science.

(undated)

Alberto Caeiro

***

Whatever it is in the center of the World,
It gave me the exterior world as an example of Reality,
And when I say “This is real,” even about a feeling,
I can’t help seeing it in some exterior space,
I see it with some vision outside me and alien to me.

Being real means not being inside myself.
I have no notion of reality inside my person.
I know that the world exists but I don’t know if I exist.
I’m more certain of the existence of my white house
Than of the existence of the owner of my white house.
I believe more in my body than in my soul,
Because my body is present in the middle of reality,
Able to be seen by others,
To touch others,
To sit and stand,
But my soul can only be defined in terms of the outside.
It exists for me — in the moments when I believe it actually does exist —
Borrowed from the exterior reality of the World.

If the soul is more real
Than the exterior world, as you say, philosopher,
Why was the exterior world given to me as the model of reality?

If it’s more certain I sense
Than the thing I sense exists —
Why do I sense
And why does the thing rise up independently of me
Without needing me to exist,
And I’m always joined to me-myself, always personal and intransmissible?
Why do I move with others
In a world where we meet each other and where we’re in the same place
If this world is somehow wrong and it’s me that’s right?
If the world is wrong, then it’s everybody’s error.
And each one of us is only the error of each one of us.
Thing for thing, the World is more certain.

But why do I question myself, if not because I’m sick?

On certain days, the exterior days of my life,
My days of perfect natural lucidity,
I feel without feeling I feel,
I see without knowing I see,
And the Universe is never as real as those times,
The Universe is never (not near or far from me
But) so sublimely not-mine.

When I say “It’s evident,” do I somehow mean “It’s only me who sees it?”
When I say “It’s the truth,” do I somehow mean “It’s my opinion?”
When I say “There it is,” do I somehow mean “There it isn’t?”
And if this is so in life, why should it be different in philosophy?
We live before philosophizing; we exist before we know we do.
The first fact deserves at least precedence and worship.
Yes, rather than interior, we’re exterior,
So we’re essentially exterior.

You say, sick philosopher, philosopher to the end, that this is materialism.
But how can this be materialism, if materialism is a philosophy,
If a philosophy would be, at least if it were mine, a philosophy of mine,
And this isn’t even mine, and I’m not even I?

(10/24/1917)


Alberto Caeiro

***

Every time I think about a thing, I betray it.
I should only think about it having it in front of me.
Not thinking, but looking,
Not with thought, but with the eyes.
A thing that’s visible exists to be seen,
And what exists for the eyes doesn’t have to exist for thought;
Or else it would only exist for thought and not for the eyes.

I look, and things exist.
I think and only I exist.

(5/21/1917)

Alberto Caeiro

***

I’d like to have enough time and quiet
To think about absolutely nothing,
To not ever feel myself living,
To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.

(5/21/1917)

Alberto Caeiro

May 27, 1849.

—To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self−devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also—He above all—is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended. (...)

Amiel's Journal

translation: Mrs Humphrey Ward

We must

We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, a usufruct....

Amiel

August 31, 1869.

—I have finished Schopenhauer. My mind has been a tumult of opposing systems—Stoicism, Quietism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at peace with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I not consistent in the pursuit of it? and if it is a temptation, why return to it, after having judged and conquered it?

Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? The deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and deception. The individual is an eternal dupe, who never obtains what he seeks, and who is forever deceived by hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never leaves me even in my moments of religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Maia; and I look at her, as it were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. Deep within this ironical and disappointed being of mine there is a child hidden—a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of idylls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo−skeptic, a pseudo−scoffer.

“Borne dans sa nature, infini dans ses voeux,

L'homme est un dieu tombe qui se souvient des cieux.”

Amiel's Journal

translation: Mrs Humphrey Ward