{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Herr Holden,

If your parents had threatened you that either you get married or else they will never speak to you again and disown and disinherit you and adopt someone else in your place as their legal heir and never ever help you again in any way at all ,or ever see you again, then what would you have done?

What do you think Schopenhauer would have done?(Mind you,in this scenario he loses all his inheritance if he refuses to marry ). Essentially, what I am trying to ask is that do you think Schopenhauer was strong enough to withstand this economic blow and work to earn his daily bread and live all alone in the world?Are you?No help from parents or any of the other relatives.You are completely on your own , financially, socially, emotionally.

Schopenhauer does not get so much as a penny,if he says no to marriage.You get zero support from your parents and relatives.

Do I think Arthur Schopenhauer was strong enough to withstand this economic blow and work to earn his daily bread and live all alone in the world?

Schopenhauer would have "worked" for his gruel, and I suspect he would have been something of a scrapper before someone in the mob buried him in a ditch after a dispute.

Schopenhauer does not get so much as a penny,if he says no to marriage.You get zero support from your parents and relatives.

There are countless men in such a situation but have no hope of being in a position to refuse "marriage" as there is no woman foolish enough to attach herself to him.  Schopenhauer was in a unique position, and he seized it.  His parents groomed him for international commerce, hence the languages and the education in England for a spell, where he learned to hate, yes hate, what we would call the State Church of England.

I wish to harness a lifetime of "rejection" and humiliating coming to terms with romantic delusion in order to nurture a dark and morbid cynicism that not even the threat of death or torture could rob from me.  It is time for us to allow our most demented senses of humor take the reigns of the Control Panel in Our Central Nervous Systems.

I am thinking along the lines of, how to greet the Grim Reaper with only 2 days notice? 

or something more "Eastern," such as "What would you DO during the last five minutes of your life?"

What was the shape of your face before you were born?

I have a question.  What is the Will to Know?  Suppose my thirst for knowledge is what motivates the organism-as-a-whole to secure sustenance, and all the illusions about "humanity" as a more noble kind of Creature are necessary in order for us to endure the true nature of our interconnected reality: WORMs-DEPENDENT-UPON-GLOBAL-ECONOMY.

We may have to forgive ourselves for having been worms, yet conditioned to believe we were gods.  Such worms would benefit from a strong dose of self-deprecating humor.

My head might choose marriage for inheritance, but I am a difficult creature for even myself to get along with consistently, so, before too long, the marriage would prove to be a disaster.   I have come to terms with the horror I would feel upon intentionally imposing life on another generation simply in hopes of teaching someone Algebras and Codes.

On the other hand, I sympathize with those of aristocratic upbringing, of an eccentric bent, who might refuse the traditional path of marriage in order to embrace a more noble path, such as obscure education or devotion to some radical religious cult. 

What would a wealthy Pythagoras do?  Would he erect a formal school, or would his "cult" be quite small?  I suspect that we will have to be our own Pythagorases.  We have to be Schopenhauers-minus-the-financial-security.

It is not hard to imagine.  After all, most of the individuals-in-the-flesh who Schopenhauer admired in his written work seemed to have walked a path that did not lead to material wealth, but, rather, might be more accessible to one with more time to reflect, one who is ostracized by the dissimilarity of tastes and preferences.