“Great is the anguish of the man who becomes aware of his isolation and seeks to escape from his own memory; he is obsessed and outcast, flung back into the deepest animal anguish, into the anguish of the creature that suffers violence and inflicts violence, flung back into an overwhelming loneliness in which his flight and his despair and his stupor may become so great that he cannot help thinking of inflicting violence on himself so as to escape the immutable law of events” (id, 647).
Reading Notes
#258
“Can this age be said to still have reality? Does it possess any real value in which the meaning of its existence is preserved? Is there a reality for the non-meaning of a non-existence? In what haven has reality found its refuge? in science, in law, in duty or in the uncertainty of an ever-questioning logic whose point of plausibility has vanished into the infinite?” (id, 559).
#257
“He who is mentally lonely can always escape into romanticism, and from spiritual loneliness there is always a way of escape into the intimacy of sex – but for ultimate loneliness, for immediate loneliness, there is no longer any escape into symbols.
(...)
“Ah,” says the romantic, drawing on the cloak of an alien value-system, “ah, now I am one of you and am no longer lonely.” “Ah,” says the aesthete, drawing on the same cloak, “I am still lonely, but this is a lovely cloak.” The aesthete is the serpent in the romantic Garden of Eden.
Children are intimate at once with everything: the thing is both immediate and at the same time a symbol. Hence the radicality of children.
(...)
The lonelier a man becomes, the more detached he is from the value-system in which he lives, the more obviously are his actions determined by the irrational. But the romantic, clinging to the framework of an alien and dogmatic system, is – it seems incredible – completely rational and unchildlike” (id, 540-541).
#256
“(...) in this fashion, in this absolute devotion to logical rigour, the Western world has won its achievments, – and with the same thoroughness, the absolute thoroughness that abrogates itself, must it eventually advance ad absurdum:
war is war, l'art pour l'art, in politics there's no room for compunction, business is business, – all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and on the object alone, which looks neither to the right nor to the left; and this, all this, is the style of thinking that characterizes our age” (id, 446).
#255
“The style of an epoch, it is certain, affects not merely the artist; it penetrates all contemporary activities, and crystallizes itself not only in works of art but in all the values which make up the culture of the age, and of which works of art constitute only an insignificant part” (id, 414).
#254
love's function is to fabricate unknownness
(known being wisheless;but love,all of wishing)
though life's lived wrongsideout,sameness chokes oneness
truth is confused with fact,fish boat of fishing
and men are caught by worms(love may not care
if time totters,light droops,all measures bend
nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star
–dreads dying least;and less,that death should end)
how lucky lovers are(wose selves abide
under whatever shall discovered be)
whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide
more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see
(who laugh and cry)who dream,create and kill
while the whole moves;adn every part stands still:
(id, 74)
#253
the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night
one hangs out a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross in her behind
they do not give a shit for a wit
the boys i mean are not refined
they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite
the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss
they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance
(id, 52)
#252
“let's start a magazine
to hell with literature
we want something redblooded
lousy with pure
reeking with stark
and fearlessly obscene
but really clean
get what I mean
let's not spoil it
let's make it serious
something authentic and delirious
you know something genuine like a mark
in a toilet
graced with guts and gutted
with grace”
squeeze your nuts and open your face
(id, 30)
#251
may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she
may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she
but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she
(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she
(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)
(id, 21-22)
#250
“If you work in a bookshop then systematic theft is the obvious way forward for the ambitious autodidact” (Harsent, 2011: 12).
WROE, Nicholas and David Harsent (2011). “A Life In Writing” in The Guardian Review. London: Guardian News & Media.
#249
“I have called the Dichter the keeper of metamorphoses: but he is a keeper in a further sense as well. In a world of achievement and specialization, a world that sees nothing bu peaks, towards which one strives in a kind of linear focus that exerts all strength o the cold solicitude of the peaks which scorning and blurring the adjacent things, the many, the real things, which do not offer themselves for any help towards the peaks – in a world that prohibits metamorphosis more and more because it hinders the overall goal of production, which heedlessly multiplies the means of its self-destruction while simultaneously attempting to stifle whatever earlier human qualities are still extant – in such a world, which one might label the most blinded of all worlds, it seems of cardinal significance that there are people who, nonetheless, still keep practicing the gift of metamorphosis” (id, 161-162).
#248
“I feel distrustful of both the man who merely writes and the man who self-complaisantly still labels himself as a Dicther (...) For in reality, no man today can be a writer, a Dichter, if he does not seriously doubt his right to be one” (id, 157).
#247
“People are only defenseless only when they have no experience or no memory” (Canetti, 1986: 13).
CANETTI, Elias (1986). The Conscience Of Words. Translation by Joachim Neugroschel. London: André Deutsch Limited.
#246
“Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?” (id, 374).
#245
“Great is the fear of him who awakens. He returns with less certainty to his waking life, and he fears the puissance of his dream, which though it may not have borne fruit in action has yet grown into a new knowledge. An exile from dream, he wanders in dream” (id, 303).
#244
“When desires and aims meet and merge, when dreams begin to foreshadow the great moments and crises of life, the road narrows then into darker gorges, and the prophetic dream of death enshrouds the man who has hitherto walked dreaming in sleep: all that has been, all aims, all desires, flit past him once more as they do before the eyes of a dying man, and one can well-nigh call it chance if that road does not end in death.
The man who from afar off yearns for his wife or merely for the home of his childhood has begun his sleepwalking” (id, 292).
Subscrever:
Mensagens (Atom)