Category: Quotes

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the mdist of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. Lovecraft, opening paragraph of 'Call of Cthulhu'

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak).What Smail calls ‘magical voluntarism’ – the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be – is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV ‘experts’ and business gurus as much as by politicians. Magical voluntarism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low level of class consciousness. It is the flipside of depression – whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it. A particularly vicious double bind is imposed on the long-term unemployed in the UK now: a population that has all its life been sent the message that it is good for nothing is simultaneously told that it can do anything it wants to do.

Mark Fisher, 'Good for Nothing', at Occupied Times

[…] I confess that more and more suicide loses its sinfulness to me. Killing oneself can be courageous; not killing oneself, because you wish to lose nothing, even the worst that life has to off, can also be courageous. Since I live near the Seine, I have seen many people jump into the river in front of my windows.

[…] the more life is what it is – ordinary, simple – without pronouncing the word 'God', the more I see the presence of God in that. I don't know how to explain that.

[…] For myself, there is something which makes suicide possible – not even possible but absolutely necessary: it is the vision of void, the feeling of void which is impossible to bear. You want anything to stop your life. […] But this way of wanting to die is many things: it is a disgust with life, with people around you, with living only for money. To see everything which is good to lvie for disappear, when you see that you cannot fall into love with people, not only with a woman, but all the people around you, you find yourself alone with people. I can imagine living in disgust with so many things which are against you around you, and then you feel like suicide.

[…] I think in the whole world things are going very badly. People are becoming more and more materialistic and cruel, but cruel in another way than in the Middle Ages. Cruel by laziness, by indifference, egotism, because they think only about themselves and not at all about what is happening around them, so that they let everything  grow ugly, stupid. They are all interested in money only. Money is becoming their God. God doesn't exist anymore for many. Money is becoming something you must live for. You know, even your astronauts, the first one who put his foot on the moon, said that when he saw our earth, he said it is something so miraculous, so marvellous, don't spoil it, don't touch it. More deeply I feel the rotten way they are spoiling the earth. All the countries. Silence doesn't exist any more; you can't find it. That, for me, would make it impossible to live. The way this young person [in The Devil, Probably] wants to die – he doesn't kill himself, himself – he makes himself be killed. The old Robin Hood people used to commit suicide with the help of friends. He kills himself for a big purpose.

[…] Vigour comes from precision. Precision is vigorous. When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry.

Robert Bresson, interviewed [He's speaking in English, except in the last paragraph.]

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose [a thoughtful lightness]: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times – noisy, agressive revving and roaring – belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty cars.

Italo Calvino, On Lightness, Six Essays for the Millennium

… a line of flight is an immobile movement in situ, which must be internal to the very life that one lives at this place and time, as long as one manages to be and not to be in the here and now, to be absent while present, to be perceptible and imperceptible at the same time. At its best, philosophy functions as a perfect manifestion of this impalpable form of life (maybe this is the reason that venues like the classroom and the conference rarely produce philosophy worthy of its name). […]

Philosophy is, above all, a way of life in its own right. Until this elemental fact (which, as Pierre Hadot has shown, was an obvious one for the ancient Greeks) returns to inform current philosophical practice, it has no chance of getting out of the inconsequential mess in which it finds itself today. Luckily, when philosophy as a form of life devolves into philosophy as a profession, when friends degenerate into peers, the unique power that inheres in this strange mode of being does not become yet another one of those powers that dominate life (aside from the occasional stray student). Kierkegaard probably said it best: Instead of having any power whatsoever, today's philosophers seem to cheerfully 'speculate themselves out of their own skin'.

David Kishik, The Power of Life. Agamben and the Coming Politics

The magnificent, liquid word 'suicide' emerged in the heart of the baroque world. Up to that point, French legal scholars and priests with their Latin employed circumlocution. They spoke of 'self-inflicted' or 'impetuous' death. Religion and superstitution no doubt didn't wishthis decisive act to become a common noun. By denying it a place in the dictionary, they hoped, perhaps, to drive the sun out of reality. But what was Lancelot doing when, believing Guinevere to be dead, he tied a rope to the pommel of his saddle? What was Roland doing in the rocky recess at Roncevaux, renouncing flight and refusing surrender? In order to designate the 'homocide of someone who is not a third party', the theologians of the Church of Rome formed a Laton word by adding sui and caedes together. Literally: of oneself the murder. In 1652 Caramuel entitled a chapter of his Theologia moralis fundamentalis 'De suicidio' – on suicide. The word was employed first in England, then in France and Italy, before reaching Spain.

Pascal Quignard, The Silent Crossing

Venomously malignant. Noxious. Blasphemous. Grotesque. Disgusting. Repulsive. Entirely bestial. Indecent. Being among the critical greetings for Leaves of Grass. Not to omit ithyphallic audacity. Plus garbage.

Profound stupidity. Maniacal raving. Pure nonsense. Among some for the best of Shelley. Which was also called abominable.

No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on. Said Voltaire.

I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it. Said Gorky re Tolstoy.

So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print. Said John Donne's very publisher about the first edition of his verse.

Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides.

He never thinks about something; he thinks something. Said Hannah Arendt, re Heidegger.

Realizing that as recently as in the case of Haydn, musicians under the patronage of royalty were still treated as servants – and still wore livery.

He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drinke liberally by himselfe to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse. Said John Aubrey of Andrew Marvell.

The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading. Announced Petronius.

The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later. Said Louis Aragon.

Was he Christian, Jewish or atheist? Samuel Beckett was once asked in a Dublin courtroom. To which: None of the three.

The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum. An early French critic called Dostoevsky.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice. Said Cyril Connolly.

Kant's irrationally compulsive 3.30PM walk, which it is said he forswore only once in thirty years – on the day when the post brought him a first copy of Rousseau's Emile.

The sound of Paul Desmond's alto saxophone: Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.

The sign in the window says Pants Pressed Here. But when you bring in your pants, you discover that it is the sign that is for sale. Being Kierkegaard – on the typical obscurity of what normally passes for philosophy.

If you value my work, please, do not knock. Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse's door in Ticino.

A fiend of a book. The action is laid out in Hell – only it seems places and people have English names there. Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.

It is never difficult to paint, said Dali. It is either easy or impossible.

Thinking with someone else's brain. Schopenhauer called reading.

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both. Johnson once told Boswell.

A designated area for booksellers existed in the central market in Athens as far back as in the fifth century BC.

Neither Graham Greene nor Evelyn Waugh ever learned to drive a car.

Chopin was buried in Pere Lachaise in Paris – but with Polish earth later sprinkled on the grave.

The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world – is that he does not exist. Stendhal said.

Dostoevsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss. Einstein said.

'Tis such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be good neighbour, an useful friend, nay, to plant a tree, much less to save his soul. Said Pope, re writing well.

A portable fatherland, Heine called the Torah.

When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow – is it always the book? Asked Lichtenberg.

Not to be born is far best. Wrote Sophocles.

Not to be born at all would be the best thing. Wrote Theognis, at least a half a century earlier.

The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God. Said Rumi.

Morningless sleep. Epicurus called death.

Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God: they pass all understanding. Said James I.

Reality is under no obligation to be interesting. Said Borges.

Like a vile scum on a pond. Pound viewed G K Chesterton.

Borges' vision of Paradise: A kind of library.

The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them. Said Francois Mauriac.

I'm a poet, I'm life. You're an editor, you're death. Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse tavern – who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within. Wrote Michaelangelo at eighty-one – himself with eight years remaining.

I've no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will. Said Goya – nearing eighty.

It is later than you know. Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock – after having broken off its hands.

from David Markson's, The Last Novel

Great books do not put to shame lesser or merely important ones, because they hail from a different planet. Without great books, however, literature  would be a mere omnium gatherum of the written; because they are so  necessary, it is evident that they have no choice but to come into  being.

Flowerville translates Ingeborg Bachmann's essay on Bernhard

'Jandek music was never about the best', Smith insists after we have moved to my hotel room. 'It was about saying yes, but not to the best[…] It was never about the best. The people that I played with originally, they are off the map, they are still off the map, there is no map for them'.

Jandek, interviewed in the March edition of The Wire

Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow.

A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.

In no one did I find who I should be like. And I stayed like that: like no one.

Nothing that is complete breathes.

When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.

Not everyone does evil, but everyone stands accused.

Sometimes I find that misery is so vast that I am afraid of needing it.

The far away, the very far, the farthest, I have found only in my own blood.

He who tells the truth says almost nothing.

Only the wound speaks its own word.

That it man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.

There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering.

Nothing ends without breaking, because everything is endless.

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

Suffering does not follow us. It goes before us.

We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself.

When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.

Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise.

Sometimes at night I light a lamp so as not to see.

I saw a dead man. And I was little, little, little… My God, what a great thing a dead man is!

Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain.

Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.

I am in myself so little that what they do with me scarcely interests me.

Certainties are arrived at only on foot.

Man, when he realises that he is an object of comedy, does not laugh.

Near me nothing but distances.

Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.

It is a long time now since I asked heaven for anything, and still my arms have not come down.

The shadows: some hide, others reveal.

The loss of a thing affects us until we have lost it altogether.

You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.

The void terrifies, and you open your eyes wider!

When one does not love the impossible, one does not love anything.

My bits of time play with eternity.

My final belief is suffering. And I begin to believe that I do not suffer.

To wound the heart is to create it.

The sun illumines the night, it does not turn it into light.

Every toy has the right to break.

When I believe in nothing I do not want to meet you when you believe in nothing.

Sometimes I believe that evil is everything, and that good is only a beautiful desire for evil.

The love that is not all pain is not all love.

Now humanity does not know where to go, because no one is waiting for it: not even God.

The irreparable is the act of no one: it happens by itself.

I would ask something more of this world, if it had something more.

You do not see the river of tears because it lacks one tear of your own.

When you and the truth speak to me I do not listen to the truth. I listen to you.

I can wait for you no longer. Because you have arrived.

from Antonio Porchia's Voices

One counsel: when you see an open door, newspaper, radio studio, cinema, bank, anything—don't enter. By the time you're thirty you'll be nuts because you left your laugh at the door. That's my experience. Poetry is in the street. It goes arm in arm with laughter. They take each other along for a drink, at the source, in the neighborhood bistros, where the laugh of the people is so flavorsome and the language that flows from their lips so beautiful.

Blaise Cendars, interviewed

Prior to making The Turin Horse with Béla I wrote a book called Animalinside, and in this Animalinside there is a sentence, a picture that was very important for The Turin Horse, mainly there is a cage, which is so small that actually the cage is your skin. This is the case in The Turin Horse. In a big space there’s a cage, which is absolutely the same as your skin. That means your fate—the border of your fate—is your skin, and you haven’t a hope of finding a way out of this cage, of your skin, of your fate. This big space is not for you, this is nothing for you, this is only a possibility, which is not for you, it doesn’t exist for you. There is this big space, there is a big created world, but not for you because you gambled everything, you gambled and every possibility which you had you’ve lost, everything you’ve lost and you are now absolutely alone, and the last judgment will come, not tomorrow, the last judgment was yesterday, and you are living now after the last judgment, in your last judgment.

[…] When you want to convince somebody about something, if you speak in a way, in that way, you use only long sentences, almost always just one sentence, because you didn’t need this dot, this is not natural if you speak in this way, if I want to convince you about something, that the world is such and such, then it’s a natural process for the sentences to become always longer and longer because I needed less and less the dot, this artificial border between sentences, because I didn’t use, I don’t use, now, for example, I don’t use dots, I use only pauses, and these are commas, this is not my usual tone because I try, especially in English because of my poor English, to make pauses, and that’s why my tone goes a little bit down, but it is not a dot, what I found there, it is a comma, and in The Melancholy of Resistance, I tried again to write this perfect book, and my sentences became always a little bit more beautiful, although the content, my message, couldn’t change after Sátántangó, after my experience in life, but language did change and became more and more beautiful because the beauty in the language became always more important, so I reached a level, a point, I don’t know, perhaps in Seiobo There Below, perhaps in this book I’ve reached my maximum of this desire for beauty in the sentences.

[…]

MJC: In both El Ultimo Lobo and War & War the protagonists direct their monologues to someone who isn’t listening. There’s a disconnect between the protagonists’ altered state of wanting to say something—to be heard—and their listeners who do not listen.

LK:  Because I don’t believe in dialogue. I believe only in monologues. And I believe only in the man who listens to the monologue, and I believe I can be the man who listens to your monologue the next time around. I believe only in monologues in the human world. The dialogues, in American prose, after the Second World War, to be honest, the best dialogue writers are here in the USA, but dialogue doesn’t work for me because I don’t believe in dialogues.

[…]

MJC: A lot of connections have been made here in the United States between your work and Thomas Bernhard’s. Do you feel an affinity with Bernhard? Is there a connection?

LK: He made a very deep impression, of course. My first reading of Frost, for example, and The Lime Works, these two novels were a very big experience for me. But this is Thomas Bernhard. There is a big difference between us, because I am not sentimental. Bernhard, despite everything, was sentimental. He was a big believer in greatness. That’s why he was so cynical. Because he admired the great intellectuals, he was a big admirer of art. I am not. I am an observer. That’s a big difference.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

According to Cameron’s stated worldview, the ability to ‘believe in yourself ’, and by extension, your child, is primary. This is a discourse which vests not only power but also moral virtue in the very act of hope, in the mental and emotional capacity to believe and aspire. Hope and promise become more integral in an unequal society in which hard work alone has less and less chance of reaping the prizes. Through this rhetorical mechanism, instead of addressing social inequality as a solvable problem, the act of addressing inequality becomes ‘responsibilised’ as an individual’s moral meritocratic task. This process devolves onto the individual personal responsibility not just for their success in the meritocratic competition, but for the very will to compete and expectation of victory which are now figured as moral imperatives in themselves. Not investing in aspiration, in expectation, is aggressively positioned as an abdication of responsibility which condemns yourself – and even worse, your child – to the social scrapheap. […]

Here, social disadvantage is only ‘real’ in that it is an obstacle over which pure mental will and aspiration – if they are expressed correctly by being combined with hard work – can triumph. These tropes and discursive elements generate an affective mode which Lauren Berlant aptly identifies as ‘cruel optimism’. This is the affective state produced under neoliberal culture which is cruel because it encourages an optimistic attachment to the idea of a brighter future whilst such attachments are, simultaneously, ‘actively impeded’ by the harsh precarities and instabilities of neoliberalism. If ‘Aspiration Nation’ is related to such ‘cruel optimism’, it also draws on the English trope of ‘having a go’, which involves a sort of non-competitive competitiveness, of being prepared to compete without any expectation of winning, out of a recognition that sporting competition is a mode of social participation; although the difference is that in the Aspiration Nation you can’t just do your best: you have to want to win.

Jo Littler, Meritocracy as Plutocracy, New Formations

The more refined the more unhappy.

Life does not agree with philosophy: there is no happiness which is not idleness and only the useless is pleasurable.

Chekhov, notebooks (via)

Barely half a century after the death of the philosopher, the name Ludwig Wittgenstein – like that of Martin Heidegger – is part of the intellectual mythos of the twentieth century. Even if Vico's distinction between civil and monastic philosophy seemed to have become obsolete ever since the French Revolution, one is inclined to reactivate this distinction for Wittgenstein's sake. How else could one interpret the emergence of the phenomenon that was Wittgenstein in the midst of an age of political philosophies and warring illusions than as the renewed eruption of thinking in the mode of eremetic aloofness from the world? Part of the still luminescent enchantment of Wittgenstein's work and the standoffish nimbus of his life is the unexpected return of the monastic element in the moral centre of bourgeois culture. More so than virtually anyone else he attests to the moral secession of an intellectual elite from the totality of mediocre conditions.

The human being as something to be transcended: that conviction was present in the elect of the educated class in Vienna before the Great War not only in its Nietzschean guise and as a philosophy of life: it asserted itself also in the forms of a bourgeois cult of he saint, at the centre of which stood the figure of the artistic and philosophical genius. It was the responsibility of that figure to offer salvation from ambiguities and mediocrity; it was his task to show an implacably demanding youth the path fromt he depths of shameful commonness to the lofty heights of transfigurative callings. grandeur became a duty for genius, self-transcendence the minimum condition of existence. For the young Wittgenstein this meant: the human being is a rope that is strung between the animal and the logician. 

The story of Wittgenstein's life and thought is the passion of an intellect that sought to explain its place in the world and at its boundaries. What the contemporary world of the philosopher perceived as his rigid and demanding aura was the high tension of a man who required constant concentration on his ordering principles so as not to lose his mind. As one dwelling on the borderline of Being, the philosopher is never concerned with anything less than the block of the world as a whole, even when he is merely pondering the correct use of a word in a sentence. He feels as though the world along with all its order could get lost in the space between two sentences. And so, thinking becomes for him a way of navigating between islands of formal clarity that lie scatterd in the vastness of unclarity. In fact, Wittgenstein is a thinker who left behind a work of individual sentences. It was his unprecedented need for precision that would make him into a martyr of incoherence. He himself was painfully aware that he was suffering from a kind of Lord Chandos neurosis – a disorder of the ability to assert coherences of the world through words, and to believe in these claimed coherences. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein failed to meet the challenge of composing a 'real' text in the sense of continuous speech. He felt, more keenly than any other thinker before him, the difficulties of conjunctions or causal linkages, and no problem preoccupied him more profoundly all his life than the impossibility of moving from the description of facts to ethical precepts. His notes are the monument of an overly brilliant hesitation to create the world in a cohesive text. In their radical modernity, his writings attest to the disintegration of the analogy between the round cosmos and fluid prose. But precisely where Wittgenstein was no longer capable of being a proposition-happy philosopher of systems and totality in the traditional style, he was virtually predestined to lift the pathwork of local life games and their rules into the light. There was a good reason why his theory of language games became one of the most potent arguments of modern and postmodern pluralism.

Looking back today over the waves of Wittgenstein's reception, one can say at least this much about the historical importance of this peculiar Viennese character who ended up in the British world of scholars: he inoculated the Anglo-American world with the madness of ontological difference by exhorting the precritical empiricist to wonder, not at how the world is, but that it is. At the same time, he infected continental philosophy with a new idea of precise style, which brought forth flourishing outgrowths in the milieu of the analytic school. It would appear that both parties are by now in the process of getting over the phase of the initial immune responses. Ever since Alan Janik and Steven Toulmin's classic study Wittgenstein's Vienna, the stage seems set for a healthy engagement with the magical hermit. Who could still invoke Witttgenstein only to elect him the patron saint of old mind games? Who could still denounce him as the positivistic destroyer of the Western culture of reflection? After the waning of the reactive distortions, what emerges is the profile of a thinker who will undoubtedly be counted among the godparents of the intelligence of the future. Even in its logical severities and human one-sidedness, Wittgenstein's intensity holds gifts of incalculable import for posterity. It attests for all those who awaken to thinking after him that ethical questions must become more difficult. Should it ever be possible to write a critique of martyrological or witness-bearing reason – and thus a valid ethics – a decisive chapter would have to be devoted to the man Wittgenstein. He is among those flayed alive , who knows more than others what decency under stress means. among his work, what was written and what was kept quiet, one must count the admirable exertion to have endured himself and his own 'wonderful' life. 

Sloterdijk, Philosophical Temperaments

According to the theologians of the Vedic era, the gods, like the demons, are born from sacrifice. It is thanks to it that they have ascended to the heavens, in the same way as the one who carries out a sacrifice still does. They gather around the sacrifice; they are the product of the sacrifice that they share among themselves, and it is this distribution that determines the way in which they share the world. Moreover, sacrifice is not only the author of the gods. It is a god itself, or, rather, the god par excellence. It is the master, the indeterminate, infinite god, the spirit from which everything proceeds, that ceaselessly dies and is reborn.

Sylvian Levi, from a nineteenth century text cited by Agamben

Father, tear this body and this soul away from me, to make of them your things, and let nothing remain of me eternally but that tearing-away itself.

Simone Weil

In order to be absolutely truthful, I should have to track down every needless humiliation I was offered in England, and relieve it in my memory for the torture it was; and then seek out every instance of sensitivity with which someone sought to save me from humiliation; hold them together, weight them up, and have them cancel one another out, as happened to me.

One could write a book about English parties. I never got used to them. They strike me as senseless and heartless, every bit in keeping with such cold people. The idea, after all, is not to get too close. A s soon as a conversation was developing (which wasn’t an easy thing to bring about), it was time to push off and turn to somebody else. It was not done to spend too long with one person, that was accounted selfish. People were there to make rapid contact, and, still more, rapid withdrawals. Sometimes you wouldn’t even know who you had been talking to. Those were the ideal cases in these ritualised celebrations of non-contact.

During the War, more than fifty years ago now, it was England’s salvation that it was an island. It was still an island, and that asset, a colossal advantage, has been frittered away. Today, it is what’s left over from a government whose one and only prescription for everything was selfishness. People felt proud of this fact, as though it were some kind of revelation, a horde of men (and women) in pinstripes swarmed over the land, calling themselves businessmen or executives, and sought to plunder the country, just as one the country had sought to plunder the rest of the world. England decided it would loot itself, and engaged an army of yuppies for that end. 

Canetti, Party in the Blitz

… at the hour of the Smiths' birth I had felt at the physical and emotional end of life. I had lost the ability to communicate and had been claimed by emotional oblivion. I had no doubt that my life was ending, as much as I had no notion at all that it was just beginning. Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something – otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything?

I had become a stretcher-case to my family, yet this made it easier for me to put them aside at those moments when the wretched either die or go mad. The water was now too muddy, and, being nowhere in view, I am not even known enough to be disliked. The wits had diminished, and I am sexually disinterested in either the male or the feel-male – yet I make the claim on knowing almost nothing about either.

Horror lurked beneath horror, and I could only tolerate an afternoon if I took a triple amount of the stated dose of valium prescribed by my GP (who would soon take his own life). Life became a strange hallucination, and I would talk myself through each day as one would nurse a dying friend. The diminishment could go no further, and the face can only be slapped so many times before the slaps cannot be felt. I became too despondent for anyone to cope with, and only my mother would talk to me in understanding tones.

Yet there comes the point where the suicidalist must shut it down if only in order to save face, otherwise you accidentally become a nightclub act minus the actual nightclub. This, then, was my true nature as the Smiths began: the corpse swinging wildly at the microphone was every bit as complicated as the narrow circumstances under which he had lived, devoid of the knack of thigh-slapping laughter. Accustomed to people criticizing me, I am unfuffled when the barrage comes. By contrast, the other three Smiths were straightforward and had found fun, and they were not to blame for inspecting me as if pinned and mounted under glass.

Morrissey, Autobiography

His sentences are oar strokes that would propel him forward if it weren’t for the powerful current. Sometimes he pauses, falls silent and listens, as though to check whether his present situation might not have been replaced by its successor. “It’s impossible to direct anything.” Things still in the future and the distant past all pull on one string with him, sometimes ten times in the space of a single sentence. He is a man who thinks continually of great losses, without any detachment. The sea surfaces in him, and in the sea is a boulder, part of an enormous sunken city, the end of an unanticipated story, far in the past. Death knots his net … Colors that are nothing but extrusions of flesh narcotize him philosophically … The adducing of extremes, so as to be able to spit them out. Tensions between eerie subaquatic scenes. The word “yoke” occurs frequently. The word “true”—but also “untrue” and “unreal.” The word “ear of corn” may acquire the same meaning as “the whole of our welfare state.” They are his eyes that speak, they enact his thought, they pitch wildness and quiet alternately at the disquiet of others. The painter is such an oddity, I think, that no one understands him. Not a type. Always reliant on himself, and always rejecting everything coming at him, he has taken advantage to excess of all possibilities. To look at him is to look at the millennia. “Mountains, you know, can serve as telescopes, through which one can see into the future.” Or “inhumanly human.” He is able to irritate people, where there are no people. To suppress effervescence, where there is no effervescence. “Isn’t that an animal speaking? Am I not vermin?” Everything purposes the acceleration of his decay. Everything indicates a decisive childhood which was soon injured, a “stung nerve center,” an organically fertile double significance of insanity.

From Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost. (via)

(Two beings from here, two ancient gods. They were in my room; I lived with them.

For an instant, I joined in their dialogue. They were not surprised. 'Who are you? One of the new gods?' – 'No, no, just a man'. But my denial did not stop them. 'Ah, the new gods! They have finally come'. 

Their curiosity was light, capricious, wondrous. 'What are you doing here?' I answered them. They did not listen to me. They knew everything; theirs was a light knowledge that could not be weighed down with the kind of partial truth that I gave to them[…]

We have been living together ever since. And I almost no longer resist the idea that one day I may be the new god.) […]

Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion

If I had to cite texts that evoke what committed literature might have been, I would have found them in the ancient period, when literature did not exist. The first, the one closest to us, is the biblical story of Exodus. Everything can be found there: liberation from slavery, wandering in the desert, waiting for writing, that is, for legislative writing, of which one always falls short, so that the only tablets received are broken, ones that cannot make up a complete response except in their breaking, even their fragmentation; finally, the necessity of dying without completing the work, without attaining the Promised Land, which, however, insofar as it is inaccessible, is always hoped for and thus already given. 

Blanchot, 'Refusing the Established Order', Political Writings

Presently
our infantry also was left unsupported, while the different companies became so
huddled together that a soldier could hardly draw his sword, or withdraw his
hand after he had once stretched it out. And by this time such clouds of dust
arose that it was scarcely possible to see the sky, which resounded with
horrible cries; and in consequence, the darts, which were bearing death on
every side, reached their mark, and fell with deadly effect, because no one
could see them beforehand so as to guard against them.

But when
the barbarians, rushing on with their enormous host, beat down our horses and
men, and left no spot to which our ranks could fall back to deploy, while they
were so closely packed that it was impossible to escape by forcing a way
through them, our men at last began to despise death, and again took to their
swords and slew all they encountered, while with mutual blows of battle-axes,
helmets and breastplates were dashed in pieces. Then you might see the
barbarian towering in his fierceness, hissing or shouting, fall with his legs
pierced through, or his right hand cut off, sword and all, or his side
transfixed, and still, in the last gasp of life, casting round him defiant
glances. The plain was covered with carcasses, strewing the mutual ruin of the
combatants; while the groans of the dying, or of men fearfully wounded, were
intense, and caused great dismay all around.

Amidst
all this great tumult and confusion our infantry were exhausted by toil and
danger, until at last they had neither strength left to fight, nor spirits to
plan anything; their spears were broken by the frequent collisions, so that
they were forced to content themselves with their drawn swords, which they
thrust into the dense battalions of the enemy, disregarding their own safety,
and seeing that every possibility of escape was cut off from them. The ground,
covered with streams of blood, made their feet slip, so that all they
endeavored to do was to sell their lives as dearly as possible; and with such
vehemence did they resist their enemies who pressed on them, that some were
even killed by their own weapons. At last one black pool of blood disfigured
everything, and wherever the eye turned, it could see nothing but piled up
heaps of dead, and lifeless corpses trampled on without mercy.

The sun being now high in the heavens, having
traversed the sign of Leo, and reached the abode of the heavenly Virgo,
scorched the Romans, who were emaciated by hunger, worn out with toil, and
scarcely able to support even the weight of their armor. At last our columns
were entirely beaten back by the overpowering weight of the barbarians, and so
they took to disorderly flight, which is the only resource in extremity, each
man trying to save himself as well as he could.

Ammianus Marcellinus, The Battle of Hadrianopolis

We believe ourselves to understand things
first when we have reduced them to what we do not understand and cannot
understand – to causality, axioms, God, character.

Not what lies behind the scientific image of
things – what is obscure, what is in itself and what is incomprehensible – lies
beyond all knowledge; but conversely it is the immediate, the sensual image,
the surface of things that face us that eludes us.

We wander and reach the goal – but, given
the relativity of all movement, who knows if we are not standing still and the
goal is coming to us. This would presuppose a movement of the objective world
of ideas. But on this ambiguity rests a lot of religious faith.

Art is our thanks to the world and to life.
After both have created the sensuous and spiritual forms of cognition of our
consciousness, we thank them by, once again with their help, creating a world
and a life.

Perhaps it is not just due to the stage of
humanity we are in, that it comes up with the highest problems, but not the
highest solutions. Perhaps it is humanity’s inner necessity, the essence of
man. The apple from the tree of knowledge was unripe.

When man describes himself as a fragment,
not only does he mean that he has no whole
life, but more profoundly, that he has no whole life.

That man is a being who can reach the
ultimate problems but not the ultimate solutions has to do with the fact that
he has to act as if he knew the future –although he does not know even one step
of it for sure.

How deep is mankind’s destiny embedded in
the fact that its two highest ideas – infinity and freedom – are literally only
negations, only the removal of obstacles!

What is decisive and characteristic of man
is what he is desperate about.

The meaninglessness and confinedness of life
strikes you often as so radical and inescapable that you totally despair about
it. The only thing that elevates you above this is to grasp this and to despair
about it.

The concept of consolation has a much
broader, deeper meaning than we usually attribute to it. Man is a being who
seeks to be consoled. Consolation is something other than help – even the
animal seeks the latter; but consolation is the strange experience which lets
suffering remain but, so to speak, abolishes the suffering from suffering. It
does not concern the evil cause but its reflex in the deepest part of the soul.
On the whole, man cannot be helped. That is why he has invented the wonderful
category of consolation – which comes to him not only through words spoken by
others for this purpose, but also from hundreds of circumstances in the world.

You can elevate man to the idea, but you
cannot lower the idea to man. […]

In practice the worst errors are those
which come very close to the truth. […]

The high point of lust is already surpassed
when you become aware of it, while suffering only reaches its high point with
it.

Simmel, aphoisms (via)

Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversation (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes a relation.

Blanchot, Friendship (Oh the irony!)

… it was very plainly not just what the old man
said that was so moving, it was almost entirely the way in which he said it,
the total naked absorption of the mind in is problem, the tried-out words
suspended for inspection, the unceasingly pitiless evaluation they were given,
the temporarily triumphant going forward, the doubt despair, the cruel
recognition of failure, the glorious giving of solutions by something from
somewhere, the insistent rebeginning, as though no one, not even the speaker,
had even been there. Without cant, without jargon, and in terms of examples,
this abstract mind went concretely forward …

William Gass, remembering Wittgenstein

I never took note of Wittgenstein’s lectures, but concentrated
on trying to follow his train of thought. In retrospect I think it right to say
that I understood next to nothing of what was going on, though I found Wittgenstein
most impressive and stimulating.

Each conversation with Wittgenstein was like living
through the day of judgement. It was terrible. Everything had constantly to be
dug up anew, questioned and subjected to the tests of truthfulness. This
concerned not only philosophy but the whole of life.

Von Wright, remembering Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein in those days often warned us against reading
philosophical books. If we took a book seriously, he would say, it ought to
puzzle us so much that we would throw it across the room and think about the
problem for ourselves.

He had he said, only once been to high table at Trinity and
the clever conversation of the dons had so horrified him that he had come out
with both hands over his ears. The dons talked like that only to score: they
did not even enjoy doing it. He said his own bedmaker’s conversation, about he
private lives of her previous gentlemen and about her own family, was far preferable:
at least he could understand why she talked that way and could believe she
enjoyed it.

He liked the north of England,
too: when he asked the bus conductor on a Newcastle
bus where to get off for a certain cinema, the conductor at once told him it
was a bad film there and he ought to go to another. And this started a heated
argument on thus bus as to which film Wittgenstein ought to see and why. He
liked that: it was the sort of thing that would have happened in Austria.

Karl Britton, remembering Wittgenstein

I took my camera with me – which was the cause of another
scene with Ludwig. We were getting on perfectly amicably – when I left him for
a moment to take a photo. And when I overtook him again he was silent and
sulky. I walked on with him in silence for half an hour, and then asked him
what was the matter. I seems my keenness to take that photo had disgusted him –
‘like a man who can think of nothing – when walking – but how the country would
do for a golf course’. I had a long talk with him about it, and eventually we
made up again. He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed
himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself … I only
hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no
exaggeration to sat he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people
like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.

Ludwig was horribly depressed all evening. He has been working
terribly hard of late – which may be the cause of it. He talked again tonight
about his death – that he was not really afraid to die – but yet frightfully
worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted. It all
hangs on his absolutely morbid and mad conviction that he is going to die soon
– there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a
long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries
about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can’t help – for he is
mad. It is a hopelessly pathetic business – he is clearly having a miserable
time of it.

He is morbidly afraid that he may die before he has
put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has written out all his other
work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the world and of some use to the
science of Logic. He has written a lot already – and Russell has promised to publish
his work if he were to die – but he is sure that what he has already written is
not sufficiently well put, so as absolutely to make plain his real methods of
thought etc – which of course are of
more value than his definite results. He is always saying he is certain he will
die within four years – but today it was two months.

David Pinsent, on Wittgenstein