A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

-- Latham Green (pennyson...), January 12th, 2006.

"Kuhns ideas are interesting but, alas, they are much too vauge to give rise to anything but lots of hot air. If you don't believe me, look at the literature. Never before has the literature on the philosophy of science been invaded by so many creeps and incompetents.

Kuhn encourages people who have no idea why a stone falls to the ground to talk with assurance about scientific method. Now I have no objection to incompetence but I do object when incompetence is accompanied by boredom and self-righteousness. And this is exactly what happens."

EMC is my new hero.

"Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition."

I like how Cioran chose not to write, becaue it was, well, correct me if i am wrong, a violation to his desire for nothingness.

But mayve Cioran was just sad and lazy.

"When two people fall in love and suspect they are made for each other, the thing is to have the courage to break it off, for by continuing they have everything to lose and nothing to gain."

Same!

"One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy."
Edward Dahlberg

(hee hee wtf?)

(not a movie fan, i guess.)

"So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born."
Edward Dahlberg

"Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy."
Edward Dahlberg

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1559704624/103-4204161-6047800?v=glance&n=283155

Ha ha! Me too.

The Mouse

Beautiful days, mice of time,
Bit by bit you gnaw my life away.
God! Soon I will have lived
Twenty-eight years, and badly.

The Carp

Carp, how long you live
In your crowded pools!
Fish of melancholy,
Does death forget you?

The Octopus

Spraying his ink toward heaven,
Sucking the blood from those he loves,
And finding it delicious:
This inhuman monster is myself.

The Dolphin

Dolphins, you play in the sea,
But the waves are always bitter.
Do I sometimes laugh with joy?
Life is still cruel.

The Lion

O lion, unhappy image
Of sadly fallen kings,
You are born now in a cage,
In Hamburg, among the Germans.

What makes this band different from The Magnetic Fields is that any glimmer of hope is absolutely extinguished.
-- The Gothic Archies

Alas, the door of fortune does not open inwards so that one can force it by charging at it; it opens outwards and so there is nothing one can do.

The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.

How empty life is and without meaning. We bury a man, we follow him to the grave, we throw three spades of earth on him, we ride out in a coach, we ride home in a coach, we take comfort in the thought that a long life awaits us. But how long is threescore years and ten? Why not finish it at once? Why not stay out there and step down into the grave with him, and draw lots for who should have the misfortune to be the last alive to throw the last three spades of earth on the last of the dead?

Ha! worthy of the man himself.

Nazism, Cioran wrote, possessed "greatness." Germans had a "need for a Führer," and Hitlerism constituted "a destiny for Germany." Cioran supported a similar dictatorship for his country and believed that "only terror, brutality, and endless anxiety are likely to bring about a change in Romania. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten to a pulp; this is the only way a shallow nation could make a name for itself." "Hitler's merit," insisted the young voice of vitalist barbarism, "consists in depriving his nation of a critical spirit."

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=xzm8107fnyrw9nnrr3p3cwbm3mc04n21

-sorry, everyone :(

"It is the worst of all possible worlds ... if it were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds."

"There is no doubt that life is given to us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome - to be got over."

--Cyril Connolly

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth. Look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity. Then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Of course, he has plenty of optimistic ones, too:

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

ANON

Dolphins, you play in the sea,
But the waves are always bitter.
Do I sometimes laugh with joy?
Life is still cruel.

OMG I used to have a woodcut print that had this poem (in french) with it. I don't think I knew it was Apollinaire, but I always loved it.

No Adorno quotes?

"Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"

God, I need to read a Cioran book!

I'm so glad there's some Nietzsche up in this bitch.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
-- Camus

most of these make lawl none moreso than this

"The way in which we have spent the afternoon is so vile, we ought not to go on living."

Wittgenstein, after attending a rowing regatta with Russell.

otm, rowing events are the worst

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the blogs.
-- Camus

More Kierkegaard (this phrase is on the cover of my - Penguin iirc - edition of Fear and trembling), not so pessimistic if like Kierkegaard you are a Christian, but I don't share Søren's faith so it's fairly brutal to me:

"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?”

I know this is not A Thread for Disagreeing with Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers and I love Kirkegaard but maaaan do I have a bone to pick with that...

My flatmate says, regarding the Cioran quotes and Hitler approval, "If he thought life was meaningless anyway, what good was Nazism going to do?"

Lucky Job, who was not obliged to annotate his lamentations!

- EMC

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history" -- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it.

--Nietzsche

"A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

Schopenhauer again.

That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding dispair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

- Bertrand Russell

"Not to be born is the most to be desired; but having seen the light, the next best thing is to go whence one came as soon as may be"

- Sophocles

"Tormenting human beings with mirrors is more fatal than cracking their head open or sticking a knife in them."

- Scott Conner aka Malefic aka Xasthur

I am living the lie that I am not essentially irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, and days when I wake up thinking about this irrelevance are bad days, and days when I wake up thinking about something else are good days.

― sometimes I pretend I am very huge and icy (kenan), Tuesday, 21 October 2008 00:18 (8 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

<3 this thread

7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

8 All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

-Ecclesiastes

The Septuagint is totally fun and simple to translate, and it's awesome realizing how weird and off the ancient Greek transliteration of the original Hebrew was. I wonder if the statements were originally so profound, or if they became like that through the watering down of language through several transliterations.

Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.

Nabakov: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Nabakov wasn't much of a philosopher - though he had a nice existential turn of phrase e.g 'Laughter in the Dark'

Nietzsche quoting the wisdom of Silenus near the start of the Birth of Tragedy is a doozy that I'm surprised no-one has quoted. Can't remember how it's worded in the book but googling wisdom of Silenus I get this:

“Oh, wretched ephemeral race … why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”

Also, not a poet, but at the start of Bolano's 2666 he quotes Baudelaire:

"An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom".

Which is pretty pessimistic whichever way you look at it.

There is an old legend that king Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, in the forests, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands, the king asked what was the best thing of all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent, motionless and inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out into shrill laughter and said these words, “Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this—to die soon.”

― dayo, Tuesday, 14 December 2010 04:46 (11 hours ago)

oh wait, that was done two posts ago hahaha

Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.

still, it's all about the journey not the destination eh

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” - Luis Bunel.

first sign of memory loss - misseplling ppl's surnames

"People tend to forget how much of their lives are spent tired, hungry, thirsty, in pain and being either too hot or too cold or in need of voiding their bladders and bowels. The same is true of how much time people spend bored, stressed, anxious, fearful, frustrated, irritated, sad, and lonely, to name but a few examples. Also unnoticed is how bad the worst parts of a life are. "

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1902

"What does follow, I think, from the conclusion that life is not good, is that we should not create more of it. When we bring new people into existence we start more lives that are not good – and we necessarily do this without the permission of those who will live those lives. We have no duty to create new people and failing to create people can do no harm to those we fail to create. Not having children might make our own lives less good, but starting lives that are not good, merely for our own gratification, is unduly selfish."

I'm about ready to jump into a pool of gin and tonic with slit wrists.

― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 2, 2011 8:23 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

“A shocking night for Irish football. This side is built to be negative, it’s not capable of creating chances. There’s an element of bankruptcy in this system.”

E. Dunphy

"There’s an element of bankruptcy in this system”

when did dunphy sell out?

You have to allow for Brady sat next to him, to be fair- has been known to get overly-defensive if any project he's been involved in gets criticised.

"Better on your arse than on your feet, Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot."

Beckett!

could fill a thread with beckett, but that's good

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you." -- Gandhi

"Give me death." -- Patrick Henry

"The world is more dangerous than sincere." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did." -- Maya Angelou

"To err is human." -- Alexander Pope

http://kottke.org/11/09/not-so-inspirational-quotes

"The Sweater"

I will lose you. It is written
into this poem the way
the fisherman's wife knits
his death into the sweater.

-Gregory Orr

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." - the homie big ludwig w.

i like that one

"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. . . . My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known- no wonder, then, that I return the love." yay, Kirkegaard

"How perfectly goddamned delightful it is, to be sure" -- Charles Crumb.

“In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Roman Opałka began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. The process was endless, but measured against its goal – infinity – it is as naught: ‘the problem is that we are, and are about not to be’.”

http://neversleep2.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/roman-opac582ka-triangulation-blog-3.jpeg?w=422&h=600

http://neversleep2.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/the-problem-is-that-we-are-and-are-about-not-to-be/

^ awesome

"I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals" - George Berkeley

"Perhaps the day may come when we shall remember these sufferings with joy" - Virgil

just because there isn't a thread for 'wry quotes by pessimistic poets'

“your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone,” my editor phones me.

dear editor:
the girls appear to be gone already.

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't exist - Lacan

im pretty sure the people i love exist. that quote was to prove the eternal irrelevance of Lacan, right?

bang

Wow, that's the sort of smug bullshit that you say to seem smart when in fact it just proves you're a complete imbecile incapable of critical thought. Well done.

Well, I wouldn't have put it like that but I guess, yeah, it is. No point saying well done to him though, he died in 1981.

*slow handclap*

To be fair, I like the first part of the quote. It's the second part which confirms what i feel about the hideousness of Lacanian solipsism. But ok, yeah, I spoke out of prejudice.

But then you did the same when you assumed my post was some kind of anti-intellectual screed when it was just express dislike for one dude.

No, I didn't assume that. I assumed that it was a lazy zing instead of addressing the philosophical ramifications of the quote. Which it was.

No need to address non-existent ramifications of a quote from someone who's clearly started out from false premises. But that's ok, dude was a poet.
Also lazy zing =/= 'the sort of smug bullshit that you say to seem smart'.

That quote's a real firecracker!

How are the premises false? What proof (logical or real-world) do you have of the falsehood of the premises? Why are they 'clearly' false?

I actually don't have a stake in whether Lacan is correct or not, or even if he's worthwhile, I just have a stake in people discussing philosophy properly.

And: lazy zings are always smug, always bullshit. The 'seeming smart' element comes from a pretence at being familiar with the subject yet clearly not enough to actually be able to handle a real conversation about it.

when Lacan says "someone who doesn't exist" he's not being solipsistic, he's saying that the loved object doesn't correspond to the human subject it resembles

sorry if that wasn't totally obvious btw

it was totally obvious to me who has never read Lacan

why are we fighting

To post smug bullshit is human...

has anyone here read any of the bruce fink books on lacan and if so which one should i read first thx

Well that was the first thing I thought about the Lacan quote, but I don't know him well enough to say if that's the case. I took it at face value. And from what little else I know about him and his work that seemed a possibility.
Funnily enough, Im currently halfway through Shakespeare's sonnets where this theme - of the loved one being a creation of the lover and any virtues imputed to them being illusions - figures large.

i guess it wd be fairer to say that to Lacan, desire is solipsistic, but in psychoanalysis that's hardly an exclusively Lacanian idea

Some questions: if love is something you don't have, how can you give it? If you don't have it, who does? Is he denying the existence of love or simply that it can't be owned? If it can't be owned then where does it exist, if he posits that it does exist?

If we attempt to give something to someone who doesn't exist, why are we doing it? I'm guessing a highly solipsistic answer is the result.

And: lazy zings are always smug, always bullshit. The 'seeming smart' element comes from a pretence at being familiar with the subject yet clearly not enough to actually be able to handle a real conversation about it.

Well, this is ilx etc. I don't think I am pretending to be familiar with the subject (in the sense you are meaning 'familiar'), I'm expressing a prejudice. Considering the thread which involves quotes expressive of their authors digust, ennui, and prejudice about the world and humankind, I think that's fair enough.

Ok i get you want people to 'discuss philosophy properly', but I clearly wasn't doing that. Emotional feeling about philosophers is acceptable, i think.

my reading: "love" - maybe specifically romantic or sexual love but perhaps not - is an expression of a desire centred on absence, but this absence doesn't exist outside of the lover and therefore can't be filled by the loved one. the loved one that the lover desires is a projection of the lover's own sense of absence, which can't be said to ever be the "real" person loved because their status as loved one is only a projection of the lover's desire.

he's playing on conventional uses of romantic language and psychoanalytic interpretations of desire - the lover thinks they can give love but since love is really an expression of absence they have nothing to give (except maybe the belief that they're giving)

we attempt to give something to someone who doesn't exist because we mistake them for somebody who certainly does exist, so this isn't solipsism, it's mistaken identity.

Thanks. Your reading is convincing as an explanation of what he means, and it's what I assumed in the first place. I think it's unsophisticated and romantic - in the brutally anguished late 18c/early 19c meaning of the word.
Wertherism, really. I would hope a psychoanalyst of the 20c would have a more subtle and nuanced perception of love and relationships between persons. Maybe he wasn't very good at his job. The angle he considers it is certainly solipsistic I think, it takes no consideration of what the other person involved in an exchange of love is giving, getting, or thinking.

Hey this is all decontextualised I know...it's only one quote. Just shooting the shit.

on a message board? how very dare you

has anyone here read any of the bruce fink books on lacan and if so which one should i read first thx

― markers, Sunday, 8 January 2012 17:05 (5 hours ago)

'The Lacanian Subject' is good, doesn't skimp on the details but still manages to be pretty readable.

ty merdeyeux!

No weight could be heavier to bear than the possibility that everything we want is possible. If that is true, then there really are things at stake in this life, things to be truly won or lost.

If we could bring ourselves to believe, to really feel, the possibility that we are invincible and can accomplish whatever we want in this world, it wouldn't seem out of our reach at all to correct such absurdities. What I am begging you to do here is not to put faith in the impossible, but have the courage to face that terrible possibility that our lives really are in our own hands, and to act accordingly: to not settle for every misery fate and humanity have heaped upon us, but to push back, to see which ones can be shaken off. Nothing could be more tragic, and more ridiculous, than to live out a whole life in reach of heaven without ever stretching out your arms.

"Humans must again be destroyed." A sentence of Goethe's, which would be worthy of the harshest sentence by St. Augustine about Predestination. How easily this sentence forms in the spirit of a man, when he says the names Napoleon and Mozart in the same breath." - Elias Canetti

doesnt quite fit here but this quote of beckett's i just read in a piece about him in el pais is hilariously negative: "i have a clear memory of my fetal existence. it was an existence in which no voice, no movement could free me from the agony and darkness that i was subjected to".

that's awesome. i have never seen it before.

I always had a soft spot for Cioran's "I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him"

Such despairing pessimism had, as is often the case, profound roots in childhood. The prosperous country town of Rasinari in Saxon Transylvania seemed like an earthly paradise to the little boy. His father was the orthodox priest of the place, and Cioran loved the cemetery where he made friends with the gravedigger who would give him skulls to play football with.

is there a correlation between paradisiacal childhoods and adult-onset extreme pessimism?

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. For hours and hours I would walk the night’s deserted streets, or, sometimes, those haunted by my fellow-insomniacs, the prostitutes, the ideal companions in moments of supreme distress. Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture . . . It was during those infernal nights that I came to understand the inanity of all philosophy. The hours without sleep are at bottom an interminable rejection of thought by thought itself . . . an infernal ultimatum of the mind delivered to the mind.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/05f1200bdf1335f33b915fb5619b274d/tumblr_mqcvru8bfJ1qzywvpo1_500.png

lol @ cruel shoes in the corner

is that as close as we'll ever get to a nilmar honorato da silva wdyll

God, I need to read a Cioran book!

― Tape Store, Sunday, August 26, 2007 6:29 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

Bertand Russell

wow

oh hi july 2013

"For once you must face the facts / Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." - Brecht

*high-fives bertrand russell*

dr morbius that's only pessimistic if you're religious iirc

nevermind i may be misreading brecht

admittedly I don't exactly find it pessimistic; just the facts, ma'am

berkeley is way upthread talking about being an oyster, but he does not really belong here. He is cool with not being an oyster because he is immortal:

there is not any property or circumstance of my being that I contemplate with more joy than my immortality. I can easily overlook any present momentary sorrow, when I reflect that it is in my power to be happy a thousand years hence. If it were not for this thought, I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals, than a reasonable mind tortured with an extreme innate desire of that perfection which it despairs to obtain.

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”
― Georges Bataille

ha! Nice one.

On that note came across a characteristically obscure one from Lacan:

"Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subjects desire."

Translation: wanting something is constitutive of not getting it.

:C

lacan is pretty brutally pessimistic but i think he is unfortunately right about dissatisfaction being built into the structure of desire.

lacan way overqualified for that idea

"the grass is always greener on the other side" - jacques lacan

the bataille quote is basically like we are only desire, we have nothing else to offer, and it melts us like the ark of the covenant in indiana jones. love bataille

i love the phrasing of it: "you perhaps now know..."

"In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

-- Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE5tVOGYnmI

ahahahaha

nilmz yer a bloody poet

'nilmz' would turn the happiest philosopher into another cioran imo

I'm a little ways into Cioran's The Temptation to Exist and there's something quite liberating about his all-encompassing negativity / contrarianism. If all possible routes to happiness or fulfillment or self-actualization are all fatally flawed (to varying degrees, as he so eloquently argues), then all that's left is to embrace our failures as cherished things. (Doubtless Cioran would loathe this interpretation, bless 'im.)

There's a bit somewhere where he talks about the "salvation of no salvation," so he may be more keen on that idea than you'd think.

http://www.full-stop.net/2014/01/15/blog/ericjesse/6-illustrated-quotes-by-e-m-cioran/

Those are amazing, and is it wrong I'd want to hang them on my walls?

(or better yet make mine own versions)

haha i tell myself the one about imposters quite a lot. a decent salve for social anxiety!

Really feeling these, I need to find and read some of this guy, because those aphorisms make me smile so much, because, yeah, you *get* it, man.

Cioran makes me laugh a lot--in agreement! Schopenhauer is wickedly funny too.

Not a philosopher per se, but think this fits here:

"Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying." - Marcel Proust, The Fugitive

what kind of code modifications would need to be made for this thread to be locked during february

I teach a 10 year-old boy in a big house in Kensington. He's a science prodigy; he asks me questions about quantum physics, grasps concepts such as gravitational wave-bending, singularities and spacetime. He's always cheerful.

He was recently set by his school a timed creative essay with the assigned title 'The Deserted Train Station'.

I now repeat this essay, verbatim.

***

My mind is a web of ideas and thoughts. But if you were to go into the deepest part of the deepest maze of my brain you would find yourself in a deserted train station. No word has ever been spoken there. It's like a cage of thoughtlessness in a world of thought. It's traping me from my destiny.

No train has ever come, dust is everywhere the smell of sadness and emotion filled the air with an unforgiving stench. If you dare to disturb the silence you would come out meaningless like a voice trying to be heard, but rejected in utter distaste. My life felt like a mistake. I felt worthless.

You would see a room with no coulour and when you look in a mirror you would see your greatest fear. There would be no exit and no hope. Hope for freedom.

Inside the train station time wouldn't move as if the second hand was afraid, afraid of the world and life. The rooms walls are made of guilt, the roof of meaningless and the floor was made of disaster.

Maybe I'm at the wrong train station. Maybe I wasn't meant to be here. Is that why the train doesn't come? I wonder when will my train come?

Wow.

undue influence imo

As you point out, this kid is very quick to absorb and master ideas. The fact that he can skillfully manipulate this imagery does not imply that these are more than a mimicry of existential angst, trying it on like a suit of clothes to see how they might feel. Very impressive, though. And he may well have some firsthand understanding of alienation at that age, given his differences from the norm.

he wrote a hit post

"Cage of thoughtlessness in a world of thought" is almost like a Buddhist koan (though in that case thought would be the cage I suppose).

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?

"There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books."

Not a philosopher, and better in context, but:
"There's some wine left in the bottle. You drink it. The clock ticks. Sleep. . . . People care about the happy life, but that's the happy life when you don't care any longer if you live or die. You only get there after a long time and many misfortunes. And do you think you are left there? Never.
"As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you."
(Jean Rhys, "Good Morning, Midnight")

http://i.imgur.com/TlHQT7r.gif

so true

from Sartre's last interview:

With this third world war, which is going to break out one day, with this miserable ensemble that our planet it, despair returns to tempt me again: the idea that we will not ever finish it, there is not any goal, that there are only individual goals for which people struggle. People start small revolutions, but there is not a goal for humanity, there is nothing that interests mankind, there are only disruptions.

dibs on "This Miserable Ensemble" for a future book title.

I was just thinking how half the quotes in here probably have 'miserable' in them; then I read your update, ryan!

I am reminded of Garry Winogrand's Guggenheim app:

I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and what we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have become cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at the magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life. I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and further.

'We have not loved life' will be my future book title

from an interview with stanley elkin:

In a New York Times review, Josh Greenfield said that you seem to write with the conviction that the world is winless. Do you agree with this?

Yes, well, we all die, yes? We suffer, correct? The score keeps changing, is it not so? And Mommy holds us on the teeter-totter before we can sit upright on chairs. I don;t really care so much about the fact that the world is winless. It is simply a condition that seems true to me. It is just a condition the way a red light is a condition at a traffic crossing. Yet, quite marvelous books have been written about winner worlds. Other people write them.

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”
Cioran

Winogrand's conclusion is kinda profound in that Beckettian "I can't go on, I'll go on" kind of way. Similarly, there's another part of the Sartre interview (later on apparently, I'm quoting from another source), where he says, quite movingly,

The world seems ugly, bad, and without hope. That is the tranquil despair of an old man who will die within it. But that is precisely what I resist, and I know that I will die in hope; but it is necessary to create a foundation for this hope.

I've always liked this quote from the Dao De Jing (more familiar perhaps as the Tao Te Ching):

Heaven and Earth are not humane*
They regard all things as straw dogs**

*Most translations have this as inhumane. I think that's inaccurate because it ascribes a degree of intentional malevolence to Heaven/Earth (here understood as the world external to human perception). The point is not that the world is cruel; just indifferent, ahumane in the sense of amorality, etc., without a sense of good and evil or any other sense of moral epistemology

**Yes, this is the passage that the movie Straw Dogs got its name from

i like that bit, don't find it pessimistic either. it can be liberating.

This one from Adorno is a little bit out of context but i think you can follow it:

But since, in a world whose law is universal individual profit, the individual has nothing but this self that has become indifferent, the performance of the old, familiar tendency is at the same time the most dreadful of things. There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But is is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

where's that from, ryan? (thanks for posting)

towards the end of Negative Dialectics. striking passage even in context.

-Sometimes I look up at the stars and analyse the sky and I ask myself if I'm meant to be here, why.

― Raccoon Tanuki

Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet, bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, wold ring at the door from time to time. ...

Cioran

Now that's a goddamn ZING

yowwwww

Been reading some Schopenhauer, who is great (except when writing about women, about who he is a complete fuckwit).

“The appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be not monsieur or sir, but fellow sufferer, companion in misery."

"[...] it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing." - Tao Lin

meh

Sarcastic framing is a perfectly good reason to form a square.

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is the image of the human condition.

except, as a devout catholic, pascal only said that as the preliminary softening up jab before delivering his real convictions, that the death sentence could be commuted by god and all that anguish allayed to joy

religion and (worldly) pessimism go hand-in-hand.

it's not for nothing that so many of those quoted on this thread are quite critical of Enlightenment (ie, secular) derived ideals of human perfectibility.

Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet, bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, wold ring at the door from time to time. ...
Cioran

― 龜, Wednesday, 11 March 2015 21:02 (Yesterday) Permalink

Strangely I actually find this quote kind of optimistic.

except, as a devout catholic, pascal only said that as the preliminary softening up jab before delivering his real convictions, that the death sentence could be commuted by god and all that anguish allayed to joy

Pascal was a devout Catholic, but he was sympathetic to Jansenism (very anti-Jesuit) and Augustinian, i.e. had a very profound sense of original sin and the futility of "free will." Salvation (granted by God only to some) was utterly dependent on God's grace (unmerited)-- in Pascal the prospect of salvation has something absurd and (as it were) kafkaesque about it. Ryan otm that this pessimism is "critical of Enlightenment (ie, secular) derived ideals of human perfectibility." But even whatever metaphysical consolation there is in Pascal, is a gamble against the odds-- not very comforting at all.

One thing about great pessimists, they're great aphorists. Maybe if I give up all hope I'll write better sentences.

good aphorists, like good pessimists, certainly do not say 'maybe'.

alas

now that's more like

"In the end, everything is found to be wanting." -Frank Lentricchia (lit critic but oh well)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M

i was very pleased with my charity shop book haul of today until i opened at random the schopenhauer book i got and read this: "buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents." :(

you got schoped

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEQamgEW0AAXKYc.png

born 202 years ago today

was reading a new yorker piece on K and this one is a gem: "“There are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.”

“There are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.”

<3

you will regret either, really.

well I guess you regret both the doing and the not doing.

so i was wrong

you would have regretted not making that post

at least that regret would have been contained to my own self ;_;

now everyone regrets it. forgot to mention that part, Søren.

:)

(you forget that misery loves company)

into both those quotes

"let's drink til our hearts stop" - space ghost

“There are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.”

Kinda comforting, to me anyway. I hate decisions a lot, it's nice to know they don't matter.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFDtjGfW8AIIgnU.png

OTM

just some chill buddhism

If a bear ever charges me and pins me down, I swear I'll look him in the eye and say, "you're right to do this, we're a vile species" before he starts eating my face.

― #HipsterTroll has been blocked. #BringItOn (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Sunday, May 17, 2015 12:15 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

coming soon, eugene thacker tries to contribute to the canon:
http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Pessimism-Univocal-Eugene-Thacker/dp/193756147X/

http://defamer.gawker.com/a-kendall-kylie-interview-so-good-i-literally-want-to-1708536577

Kendall had an epiphany about social media on a recent family holiday to Thailand. “We had a two-hour drive from the airport to where we were staying, and I’d left my phone in my bag, so I didn’t touch it the whole way. I looked out the window at everything, and I saw people who live in huts and have dogs that were, like, withering away. And all their food, meat, was hanging in front of their house. It was very sad.

iirc schopenhauer had much the same experience on his grand tour

Someone needs to turn these into FB macros

Not to be born is best
when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light
the next best thing, by far, is to go back
back where he came from, quickly as he can.
For once his youth slips by, light on the wing
lightheaded… what mortal blows can he escape
what griefs won’t stalk his days?
Envy and enemies, rage and battles, bloodshed
and last of all despised old age overtakes him,
stripped of power, companions, stripped of love—
the worst this life of pain can offer,
old age our mate at last.

myth of silenus?

expressed by chorus in oedipus @ colonus
echoing, yes, the wisdom of silenus

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xft1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/11351316_882616678478374_2959348984621827832_n.jpg?oh=6571456239eb5f3735bc5b7102246f3e&oe=55F84A24

let's make the best of the situation before i finally go insane

- eric clapton

http://i.imgur.com/re0GCuv.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/04216a3895b907eacb0d84c90e99e345/tumblr_nqhba4aomV1rodhzko1_1280.jpg

perfect w/ cheerful av photo

"The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion, each of which winds itself upon the supreme insanity that there are persons of any kind, when all that can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream."
-- Thomas Ligotti, or at least TL's words delivered by David Tibet. https://youtu.be/lxZpEFJhO6k

I'm most displeased that the homemade video for this that I once saw on vimeo is no longer there. It was a miracle.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/10/us/universe-dying/index.html?sr=cnnifb

The conclusion of a new astronomical study pulls no punches on this. "The Universe is slowly dying," it reads.

Astronomers have believed as much for years, but the new findings establish the cosmos' decline with unprecedented precision.

I liked this quote from the Charting the Slow Death of the Universe

"The Universe will decline from here on in, sliding gently into old age. The Universe has basically sat down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze,” concludes Simon Driver.

Since we're quoting news reports today:

On average, the effect of a new baby on a person's life is devastatingly bad — worse than divorce, worse than unemployment and worse even than the death of a partner.

lol that's great

but is it worse than marriage?

Sloterdijk, "Rules for the Human Zoo"

Two thousand years after Plato wrote it seems as if not only gods but the wise have abandoned us, and left us alone with our partial knowledge and our ignorance. What is left to us in the place of the wise is their writings, in their glinting brilliance and their increasing obscurity. They still lay in more or less accessible editions; they can still be read, if only one knew why one should bother. It is their fate--to stand in silent bookshelves, like posted letters no longer collected, sent to us by authors, of whom we no longer know whether or not they could be our friends.

allows the possibility of authors being friends; too optimistic

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one. - Mignon McLaughlin

― mayhaps, Friday, May 11, 2007 9:17 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nice one--missed it the first time I read this thread.

Have been inspired to put half a dozen of these quotes into an email entitled 'Friday Funnies' and send it round the office.

Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity

The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Thomas Bernhard: “The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.”

The Jacques Monod quote doesn't seem that pessimistic to me.

Monod (a biochemist by trade) also believed that evolution of complex, intelligent life was so unlikely that we're likely the only ones. So our solitude is absolute.

http://nihilisa-frank.tumblr.com

Claude Levi-Strauss:

To establish a correlation between the emergence of writing and certain characteristic features of civilization, we must look in a quite different direction. The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, at any rate, is the typical patter of development to be observed from Egypt to China, at the time when writing first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment ... My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other.

love that tumblr

here's one from an anguished cosmologist

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

http://www.sns.ias.edu/pitp2/2011files/PhysRevD.21.3305.pdf

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/0DDCEADD-CC33-4C29-B97D-5AC5E0AFB694_zpsjz2zhamg.jpg

^^ so into this

is it really worth starting a new thread? all these sites die eventually

― Cosmic Slop, Sunday, 20 September 2015 00:05 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

"We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence." -- more Cioran

https://66.media.tumblr.com/c627ef171c430ef153db578ba403632f/tumblr_oae9r1xqjw1qgktofo1_540.png

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

Peter Wessel Zappfe, The Last Messiah

A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.

Pat David Benatar

otm

I love that, although this part smacks of the kind of claim that gets very puzzling when you try argue it out:

there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence

Like, does it even make sense to talk about the 'advantages' of existing over not existing? Does that mean comparing the conditions of existing things and non-existing things?

Well, that's his point. What he calls the 'asymmetry' between living and not existing. Someone who has never existing has not been deprived of anything (if we thought otherwise we think we had a duty to have as many children as possible) but those who suffer are worse off for having been born. So even a little bit of suffering makes life terrible, because you wouldn't have lost and of the good stuff by not existing (you wouldn't exist, obviously) but you would benefit from the absence of a little suffering.

I disagree with his position, but I think it's somewhat compelling.

Actually, ignore that. Aside from spelling errors and omissions I don't think I can really discuss that stuff atm.

good thread to revisit in these times

my wife changed her facebook profile pic to a photo of the cover of "the trouble with being born"

maybe this thread should be reserved for the thing itself, but i've been thinking about this mode of thinking/writing recently too. mostly in terms of defending it (i am an aficionado after all). but it's tricky because i'm not sure you can defend it on grounds of utility, or politics, or ethics (schopenhauer aside) because it seems to issue from some other absolutely necessary space that doesn't answer to those things. it's the shadow side of radically transcendent forms of religion but it seems occupied with vacating those forms of discourse/thought of value while holding on to the form.

gotta repost this one from Sartre because i'm feeling it rn. (plus now i can fix my typo)

With this third world war, which is going to break out one day, with this miserable ensemble that our planet is, despair returns to tempt me again: the idea that we will not ever finish it, there is not any goal, that there are only individual goals for which people struggle. People start small revolutions, but there is not a goal for humanity, there is nothing that interests mankind, there are only disruptions.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosopher-failure-emil-ciorans-heights-despair/

^^^haven't read that yet, but figured good or bad it was worth posting here.

oh yes, choice quotes in there.

“Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.”

the gods take no thought for our happiness. only for our punishment.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2pcxo3XUAEF32S.jpg:small

-- bob marley seneca

stoicism is not pessimism!!!

More context for Seneca, Natural Questions Book III, 29.5-10:

So whenever the end of human history arrives, when the earth's parts have to perish and all be utterly destroyed, in order that primitive, innocent people may be created afresh and no teacher of worse behavior may survive, then more liquid will be produced than there has ever been before. For at present the elements are weighted out ous required. One of them needs to be increased so that an imbalance may upset the current equilibium. Water will be increased: for now there is enough to encircle the land, but not to cover it; whatever you add to it must overflow into alien territory.
So consider whether the earth does not also need to be diminished, so that the weaker may succumb to the stronger. So it will begin to decay, thent to decompose and turn to liquid, and to dissolve into a steady stream of putrefaction. Then rivers will spring up beneath mountains and make them crumble under the onslaught.
Then fields that are affected become soddon; the the ground will exude water; the mountaintops will bubble over. Just as healthy parts become diseased, and an ulcer spreads to adjacent areas, so the regions closed to land that is already awash will themselves dissolve and forme a trickle, then a fast current; then, as rocks gape apart all over the place, they will rush through the channels and join up all the seas. The Adriatic will be no more, nor the strats of the Sicilian sea, nor Charybdis, nor Scylla. The new sea will overwhelm all those myths, and the ocean that now encyrcles the land, assigned to its outer edges, will reach the center. What happens next? Winter will cling on to the months that do not belong to it, summer will be kept out, and all the heavenly bodies that dry up the earth will fade away, with their heat suppressed. So many famous names will disappear, the Caspian and Red seas, the Ambracian and Cretan gulfs, the Propontis and the Black Sea, when that deluge spreads a single sea over everything. All distinctions will disappear; everything that has its own place assigned by nature will be mixed together. No one will be protected by city walls or by towers. Temples will be no use to worshippers, nor the highest points of cities, for the waves will overtake them and pull them down even from the citadels.
Waters will converge from the west and from the east. A single day will bury the human race. All that fortune's indulgence has fostered for so long, all it has elevated above the rest, the noble and the honored alike, and the kingdoms of great nations, all will be sent to the bottom.

(typos all mine)

Anyway, Jerry Bruckheimer, 1st century style.

dunked right in fukuyama's jaw

sluices for douches

Still doesn't sound that pessimistic, he seems comforted by all that.

that's a beautiful passage.

(it is interesting to consider how something like stoicism or other pre-modern forms of wisdom--like buddhism maybe--tend to sound like pessimism to modern ears)

It is lovely.

Beautiful.

tosh

albaniaaaaaa

albaniaaaaaaa

you border on

theeee

aaaaa

driiiii

atic

aaand your main export is _______

someone tweeted this one today, from the master:

"Our existence is happiest when we perceive it least; from this it follows that it would be better not to have it." -- Schopenhauer

I dunno if Russell Hoban counts as an anguished philosopher but it's his birthday, from Turtle Diary:

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: 'This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: 'This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C377vV6XAAAjb91.jpg

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter4.html

The road dividing the two, as far as our well-being and enjoyment of life are concerned, is downhill; the dreaminess of childhood, the joyousness of youth, the troubles of middle age, the infirmity and frequent misery of old age, the agonies of our last illness, and finally the struggle with death — do all these not make one feel that existence is nothing but a mistake, the consequences of which are becoming gradually more and more obvious?

Schopenhauer was a pretty intense guy

he's so right

I don't think existence is a mistake, because we don't really have much of a choice in it; even committing suicide has biological roadblocks to it. Enjoy the ride, then you die, because it's going to happen anyway. What else can ya really do.

bitch about it in beautiful prose.

just going by that quote, the answer clearly is to commit suicide before you hit middle age

I've seen people have ball into their 80s. If Schopenhauer took the stick out of his ass and partied a little, maybe he would've had a different view of things.

* a ball

idk if u read enough about gnarly living conditions anytime pre-second half of 20th century, life really become intolerably painful a few decades in, i could see rational suicide just in that 'fuck it' mode. but middle age is much less troubling and old age much less infirm and miserable now than it was in Schope's day, so imo we ought not complain

If there's one thing I know, it's life in excruciating pain. Not only that, but there's a good chance I'm going to die a horrible death in my 40s or 50s, which is coming soon. Schopenhauer has no idea what he's talking about as far as that goes; Nietzsche was a thousand times worse off than him and somehow found out how to have a better attitude.

you're a lot less funny than schopenhauer

I'm a lot less a lot of things than Schopenhauer. Big deal.

i wonder if schopenhauer would feel so down in the dumps if he ate more fibre or took up badminton

Who knows, maybe his philosophical viewpoint was caused by a bad diet. That's about how deep and meaningful things are in life, I've found.

lots of things with simple causes can still be articulated spectacularly & profoundly, and something having a straightforward cause doesn't necessarily make it any more straightforward to deal with

"You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators."

Jim Thompson

oooh I like that

I was curious about the regard for Cioran in his homeland:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/45/36/9f/45369ffa1a48d1120144c62425fcb2ea.jpghttp://www.sculpture.ro/photos/1_1382548347.jpghttp://static4.evz.ro/image-gal-604/2014-11/bustul-lui-emil-cioran-in-rasinari.jpghttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ro/thumb/7/79/Emil_Cioran-bust.JPG/675px-Emil_Cioran-bust.JPG

Seriously doubt this would bring him any real pleasure, but perhaps a puckish chuckle.

Top right is brutal. It's like the Eiffel tower with his head stuck on top.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/scholarly-advice-for-dark-times

From a James Wood essay about Bohumil Hrabal:

Hrabal sometimes said that he rooted his comedy in one of his favourite findings, a dry-cleaner’s receipt, which read: ‘Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.’

Ha

Been reading Thacker's "Infinite Resignation"--and while I wasn't very impressed at first it has grown on me. Hopelessly "academic" (as that needless academic qualifier in the title gives away, even fucking resignation has to be xtreme now!), since it's as much about reading the great pessimists and thinking about pessimism as a form of thinking as it is an instance of the thing itself. Sometimes quotes from Cioran or whoever come up and they are bracing in their directness, which Thacker by contrast often places at a kind of theoretical remove--as if he's asking what it means to see the world this way rather than directly feeling it, maybe he's only tempted. Not always, of course,...though T's pessimism is very different from his (our?) heroes because it's so damn secular and prosaic...no "tears of the saints" here...Raises the question if there could be a "Book of Disquiet" for the hyper-connected 21st century...I think the disgust is there but not often those quiet solitary lost hours which seem to be the necessary environment for, say, Cioran envying the freedom of the stillborn...

Nope, 37:40 evolved into Jackie Moore - This Time Baby (1979)

Wrong thread, sorry.

Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road. If you can’t replace the fear or the thrill of the chase why stir yourself to persue yet another empty kill? Why carry on with the charade?

Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all

Arthur Balfour