Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

[Bleak&Icy]

"Men are wretched by necessity, and determined to believe themselves wretched by accident."
-- Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts (trans. J.G. Nichols)

[When_MP_Attacks]

Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.

--G. Greene

[When_MP_Attacks]

You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.

--Jim Thompson

[Bleak&Icy]

"Song for a Dead Time" by Michael Gira

"Now the past is untrue, and this breath is a lie, and the sun is an emptiness, that burns through the sky. And this ground it'll slide down, down into the sea, and when this body dies, no man will breathe one word, of ignorance, for me... So bury your trust beneath the ground with me, and lay your loneliness down for the sun to consume... Now the earth bleeds cold water, in my open hands, but their bodies bleed poison, and they swallow the sand. And we'll walk to the river, where we'll die of a thirst, and my fate, it's no question: every fool he is broken beneath the same, unholy curse... So bury your love beneath the ground with me, and lay your loneliness down for the sun to burn, to sand..."

from the liner notes of Swans, Various Failures (Young God Records)

[Bleak&Icy]

"We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end by disguising ourselves from ourselves." -- La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

[Bleak&Icy]

"We have to accept the reality as it is imposed on us by the culture, by society or whatever you want to call it, and at the same time understand that there is nothing that we can do to experience the reality of anything." U. G. Krishnamurti

[When_MP_Attacks]

No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.

- Lovecraft

[Druidic]

Resistance at any cost is the most senseless act there is. -- Friedrich Durrenmatt.

This is (I feel) an objective and humane statement. The pessimistic element enters when you know the people who need to hear and understand it won't.


Is this site a bit sleepy? Maybe the Doldrums of Summer...eh?

[Karnos]

Some quotes by Albert Caraco, translated by me (From a Spanish text).

"When humans realize that there is no remedy other than death, they shall bless their murderers"

"If there is a god, chaos and death figure as two of its attributes. If there isn't then nothing changes, since there is enough chaos and death until the end of time"

By Emil Cioran (Also translated by me from a Spanish text)

"As soon as one rises slightly above life, she takes revange by draggin us back to her level"

"With or without suffering, nothingness will devour us, indifferently and irremediably, for all eternity."

[Bleak&Icy]

"[...] it was nothing more than an urge to repeat the past. This is what we mean by home, the place where we repeat the past: Freud tells us this, and he also tells us that most of what we call love is our resistance to the prospect of leaving home."

-- Patrick McGrath, Trauma

(McGrath is my favourite living novelist. Do you like kooky facts? He spent the early part of his childhood living on the grounds of Broadmoor, the British high security psychiatric hospital, where his father was superintendent. Fine boyhood training for a Gothic novelist, who specialises in twisted love stories told by unreliable narrators.)