The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

[island--adventure]

Most people cannot be rescued; they can be accompanied. That is rescue enough.

[island--adventure]

No charcuterie permitted; meat must be humble and plural. Beans count. Pasta counts. Bread counts in every language. You eat to prove to the world you are still taking its materials and turning them into you.

[island--adventure]

It’ll be okay. People are built to move forward by forgetting.

[island--adventure]

[funeral]

This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.

Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[ordinarybureaucrat]

Yahya Sinwar interviewed by Francesca Borri, 2018

[ewaneneollav]

if being human is overall a pleasant enough experience to compensate for the various agonies that arise throughout, then optimism is a cord that keeps you tethered to that truth, even during the times when you start to question it. but if being human is not really pleasant enough to make itself worthwhile in the end, then optimism is a kind of tyrannical perspective. it can make you feel like you’re constantly falling short of something, constantly failing to access the bounty of existence

the problem is, neither of the two conditions i’ve put forward can be true, since it would require some kind of deity to step in & define the human experience as this or that, in a way that would transcend all our wildly different perspectives so that we could know whether it was joy or pain that was a deviation from the standard. we would know whether existential security was a thing certain people attained unlike the rest, or whether it was something certain people lost unlike the rest… so optimism is meaningless. it’s there to affirm you when you feel positive & equivocate or torture you when you feel negative. you’ll undergo the same oscillation either way

[island--adventure]

in the brothers karamazov, there's an old monk who says each of us is guilty for everyone's sins. not just your own, but mine too. all of them. this sounds impossible until you realize it's not about blame - it's about how connected we are. every small kindness you offer isn't just helping one person; it's healing the whole world a little. every moment of love is answering someone's prayer you didn't know they made.

[island--adventure]

[island--adventure]

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

[island--adventure]

Feel the cruelty of having to harvest all the beauty you can within the confines of a moment. Harvest it before you’re back in your bed in the cold light of morning and all strong feeling is diluted, and somehow shameful. Strange how you can smash cut from aloneness, to friends, to being surrounded by people and revelry, back to aloneness. Now, when aloneness feels like it always was and will always be, despite the bruises on your thighs and poorly lit photos on your phone that serve as evidence to the contrary.   Sometimes I feel like I only ever experience these nights in the past tense.   Yet again, the tension of the night, the ephemeral lustre it holds a crop inexpertly harvested and thrown away before it could be taken somewhere else, made into something. All I hold now is snatches of people’s faces, already hazy, relegated far back behind my eyes. But I’m pretty sure I had fun. Fuck it. Fuck it, right?

[island--adventure]

“your values are not serious, since you choose them yourselves.” To that I can only say that I am very sorry that it should be so; but if I have excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are.

What man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.

[island--adventure]

His historical situations are variable: man may be born a slave in a pagan society or may be a feudal baron, or a proletarian. But what never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.

[island--adventure]

The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. --- When Descartes said, “Conquer yourself rather than the world,” what he meant was, at bottom, the same – that we should act without hope. --- One need not hope in order to undertake one’s work.

[island--adventure]

Certainly, many people think that in what they are doing they commit no one but themselves to anything: and if you ask them, “What would happen if everyone did so?” they shrug their shoulders and reply, “Everyone does not do so.” But in truth, one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing; nor can one escape from that disturbing thought except by a kind of self-deception.

[island--adventure]

From another quarter we are reproached for having underlined all that is ignominious in the human situation, for depicting what is mean, sordid or base to the neglect of certain things that possess charm and beauty and belong to the brighter side of human nature: for example, according to the Catholic critic, Mlle. Mercier, we forget how an infant smiles.

[island--adventure]

Earlier authors, confronted by a population of forest dwellers with no king and employing only stone tools, were unlikely to have seen them as in any way primordial. Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans.