Ibra,
My heart smiles upon reading your validation. You had once told me that the Muse of Truth had favored me, and I will openly acknowledge here that this had helped a great deal to sustain my sanity.
Lately, I have had no inclination to type or even scribble. I've just been experimenting with observing the raw reality of my inner life. This had been suggested to me by Holden. Just this morning, I read (out loud) Martin Butler's "The Pessimist's Handbook" (not to be confused with the collection of Schopenhauer's "popular essays".) I was curious about how that PDF file ended up on my Kindle, so I did some research here on our humble little message board. As it turns out, this honest thinker turned author was discovered by Raul of Paraguay earlier this year: (
Spinoza on the Futility of Remorse, Guilt, Shame, and Repentance). That thread alone, the one that Holden started, "A Question for Herr Hauser and Senor Raul," if printed, would be 710 pages long. It is the tip of a Big Mother Iceberg.
Sometimes I will "print to PDF file" then send the entire thread to an ereader (Kindle). It is actually very good reading for insomniacs.
This message board is not aimed at the masses, but at those courageous minds that delight in contemplating certain unpleasant brute facts about our existence. None of us will know for sure if any of the others are in some kind of trouble; but as there are literally only a handful of us, one's disappearance will be noticed.
I am glad you are safe and sound for the moment. As we all know, any of us could evaporate into the void at any given moment.
I had been through some minor heartache recently, and it was extremely comforting to have Brother Holden listen to my plight (through private messages). His council has been wise. Please do feel free to take advantage of the private message feature on the board. We are fortunate to have sustained this living message board, destined to be archived on The Wayback Machine. In actuality, we are carrying on a kind of Gortbusters Tradition here.
I have also enjoyed reading "the Nighwatches" --- I would have sworn that Silenus suggested this read, since I accidentally associate it with Thomas Bernhard, the author of
Gargoyles (March 2021), but the work (by anonymous German author) is named in
Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (page 89, in the section
Work Not Done?: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti) [March 2020]:
Wagner: Recently I read an old interview with you in the magazine Tekeli-li. I found it very interesting that you mentioned the unknown German author of the book The Nightwatches as some kind of reinforcement for your own work. Is it by chance the book Natchwachen, that was published under the nom-de-plume Bonaventura at the beginning of the nineteenth century? This is one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Romantic period and is hardly known even in Germany.
Ligotti: The Nightwatches is indeed a forgotten masterpiece. Any book that is so explicitly at odds with the social and religious culture of the world, especially during the period it was written, is doomed to be ignored. A modern-day counterpart to this book is the work of Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard. But Bernhard was always raging against the Nazi mentality that he saw as still holding sway within Austria, so his work has been embraced somewhat, at least in Europe. His work is still too grim for consumption by English-speaking countries. English and American readers will only tolerate books that ultimately uphold the status quo and offer people reasons why their miserable lives are worth living.
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It turns out that Silenus did RE-call my attention to this masterpiece in his thread,
The Nightwatches of Bonaventura (January 2021)
Maybe I will start a "blank thread" which points to
Martin Butler's website. I would think that, were any of us in a relatively affluent position with access to the right kinds of resources, we could reconstruct much of what has been considered here.
I unofficially give anyone in the world permission to explore, investigate, and organize what survives of this board or archive.org to incorporate into their own "work". Copyright is the ruin of all literature. We may be original thinkers, but it is clear that there have been others like us before, and there will be others like us in a possible future - they, as Salinger points out, will, in turn, most likely appreciate our little contributions and suggestions, just as we appreciate a presence like
Martin Butler.
We can expect to be ignored, and yet here we are, communicating. How many readers does it take to be read? One reads as an individual entity. We, each one of us, is at once potential receiver and sender of these gems.
To clear things up, there are 3 different authors I focus on in this post:
first, the anonymous author of Nightwatches (suggested by both Ligotti AND by our very own Silenus);
secondly, Thomas Bernhard (suggested by Silenus);
lastly, Martin Butler (discovered by Raul of Paraguay).
This message board has been a kind of salvation for me as well, even if only a sporadic and temporary kind of salvation.
PEACE