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

General Category => Why Bother? => Topic started by: Nation of One on May 19, 2015, 09:06:46 pm

Title: Pessimistic Passages
Post by: Nation of One on May 19, 2015, 09:06:46 pm
There is a good thread at Thomas Ligotti Online: Pessimistic Passage of the Day (http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1653)

Heads Up:  Penguin is releasing Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe on October 6th, 2015.

Stick around.  I salvaged some of H-Files 2 and I plan on rescuing The H Diaries this Thursday, the 20th!   ;) ;)

"Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death."

"Nothing can be explained. The world only knows how to do one thing, to roll over and kill you, as a sleeper kills his fleas. That would be a stupid way to die, I said to myself, to let myself be crushed like everybody else. To put your trust in men is to get yourself killed a little." -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (trans. R. Manheim).

"The world either breaks or hardens the heart."

I just joined The Nightmare Network this evening.  ~ Gorticide   :P
Title: Re: Pessimistic Passages
Post by: Nation of One on August 09, 2015, 08:45:45 pm
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

Samuel Beckett


"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined 'notations', 'situations', anecdotes... All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our 'real life' days."

--Michel Houellebecq, first paragraph of H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
Title: Re: Pessimistic Passages
Post by: Nation of One on September 09, 2015, 10:28:05 pm
" ... a man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over."   - S

Learning something technical, as it becomes less mysterious, is somewhat of a thrill, but there is a sense of disappointment mixed in there as well ... ah, to be a hypersensitive neurotic with rotten teeth ... To write like the Underground Man ... but, why bother?  Why not just let our thoughts run on where they will without imposing sense?

Why not make plans just to smash those plans to bits ... study something with great enthusiasm, then just abruptly stop and move on to something else ?  :-\

Eh --- a man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed.


January 8, 1914
[...] I should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

October 21, 1921
The truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.

Franz Kafka, from "Diaries (1911-1923)".
Title: Re: Pessimistic Passages
Post by: Nation of One on December 09, 2015, 07:23:14 pm
Losing interest in everything, but continuing to explore libraries for C++ almost drearily, wondering if I will even make use of anything I explore ... but I am not complaining.  This is what I do - an alternative to suicide, right?  What else are we to do with our lives?

Anyway, wanting to be spontaneous and tired of searching for books that are just at my "speed" or learning level (they don't exist, we have to discover our own curriculum), and rather than search aimlessly on the Internet for something in my orbit, I came to this thread and did some fishing.

Here's a good fit:

To the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow... To the healthy-minded way, on the other hand, the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased...

But healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which the insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilisation is founded on the shambles [i.e. slaughterhouse], and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself!

-- William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, cited in Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist


“Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.”  ―  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance
.  - Graham Greene


Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Quote
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept f%#$ing and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaiting them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People ****d and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at the retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

"I did not even want to discover truth anymore because I had guessed what it was. The truth was that life is meaningless.

"The only thing that amazed me was how I had failed to realize this in the very beginning. All this had been common knowledge for so long. If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me, and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That's what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion! Nor is there anything funny or witty about it; it is only cruel and stupid."
  - excerpt from Confession, Leo Tolstoy