Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

[teguififthzeal]

"The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privilege perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; but ourselves are shadows."
— Adolfo Bioy Casares

[Liam Barden]

L. F. Céline

An immense hatred keeps me alive. I would live for a thousand years if I were certain of seeing the whole world croak.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

People cling to their rotten memories, to all their misfortunes, and you can’t pry them loose. These things keep them busy. They avenge themselves for the injustice of the present by smearing the future inside them with sh¡t. They’re cowards deep down, and just. That’s their nature.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

The abbé had very bad teeth, decayed, discolored, ringed with greenish tartar, in short, a fine case of alveolar pyorrhea. I was going to talk to him about his pyorrhea, but he was too busy telling me things. The things he was telling me kept squirting against the stumps of his teeth under the impulsion of a tongue, no movement of which escaped me. In a number of spots the edges of his tongue were bruised and bleeding.
This kind of meticulous observation was a habit, you might say a hobby, of mine. When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth-how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It’s not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it’s sticking together that’s difficult. Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than sh¡t; our frenzy to persist in our present state-that’s the unconscionable torture.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

[Pharpetron]

One always admits to being a pessimist. -- Eugene Thacker

[Liam Barden]

Monsieur Land is particularly shrewd . . .

At its root literature is writing for nothing; a pathological extravagance whose natural companions are poverty, ill-health, mental instability, and all the other symptoms of a devastated life that is protracted in the shadow of futility.
– Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

[When_MP_Attacks]

When one realizes that his life is worthless, he either commits suicide or travels.

- Edward Dahlberg

Why must every eleven minutes of my life be filled with misery?

-- Squidward Tentacles

[ToALonelyPeace]

"Many famous English comedians committed suicide. T. E. Dunville, an excellent funny man, overheard someone say as he entered a saloon bar: 'That fellow's through.' The same day he shot himself by the River Thames.

Mark Sheridan, one of England's foremost comedians, shot himself in a public park in Glasgow because he had not gone over well with the Glasgow audience.

Frank Coyne, with whom we played on the same bill, was a gay, bouncy type of comedian, famous for his breezy song:

You won't catch me on the gee-gee's back again,
It's not the kind of horse that I can ride on.
The only horse I know that I can ride
Is the one the missus dries the clothes on!

Off stage he was pleasant and always smiling. But one afternoon, after planning to take a drive with his wife in their pony and trap, he forgot something and told her to wait while he went upstairs. After twenty minutes she went up to see what was causing the delay, and found him in the bathroom on the floor in a pool of blood, a razor in his hand -he had cut his throat, almost decapitating himself. "

--Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography

[ChildofOldLeech]

"This cruel age has deflected me,

like a river from its course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me ,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.
Here in the only city I can claim,
where I could sleepwalk and not lose my way;
how many foreign skylines can I dream,
not to be witnessed though my tears.
And how many verses have I failed to write!
Their secret chorus stalks me
close behind. One day, perhaps,
they'll strangle me.
I know beginnings, I know endings, too,
and, life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.
And a certain woman
has usurped my place
and bears my rightful name,
leaving a nickname for my use,
with which I've done the best I could.
The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person that I am,

I should know at last what envy is."

- Anna Akhmatova

[Kevin]

What brilliance!

[MTC]

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."
- Artaud