Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

[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.)

[Bleak&Icy]

This comes from Bukowski's novel Factotum. Maybe not pure pessimism, but highly pessimistic realism:

"I got into bed, opened the bottle, worked the pillow into a hard knot behind my back, took a deep breath, and sat in the dark looking out of the window. It was the first time I had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me. I took a drink of wine."

[Viva June]

Reading The Passion Artist (1978) by John Hawkes, I came across this (among many other fine passages, one of them concluding that "there was nowhere to go"):

He was in the hands of darkness. He was lying face down on his bed of stars. But it was not the darkness of night, which is always brimming with the implicit light of the impending day, but rather the eternal darkness of that interior world into which no light can shine and whose nomenclature can be found only in the formulations of the psychological function. Here the star is a matter of neither light nor time. Here the spectator is never allowed forget that the illumination occasionally and slowly gathering, like a fog on a marsh, and in itself becoming the "daylight" necessary to the experience of the interior world, is not in fact the light of day or the light of dawn, but is only a reflection of that light-in-time by which a certain day once existed, or will in the future exist, or now exists but as imaginary without a genesis in either the past or the future. By the "light" that appears in the eternal darkness, the spectator has the sensation that for him actual light, natural light, light-in-time has been extinguished. No day will come. Now he himself is only a figment of his own psychological function within the only domain that is eternally dark, even when "lighted," and eternally insubstantial despite the sights and sounds with which it is either suddenly filled or emptied. It is here, when he has all but lost it, that the spectator knows the dread of consciousness.

(And now I shall test this theory by getting myself seriously drunk.)

[Dr. Bantham]

Quote Originally Posted by Viva June

(And now I shall test this theory by getting myself seriously drunk.)

Seriously, I am now theorizing about this self by testing my drunkenness.

[Viva June]

And by testing this "I", shall my now serious self get theory-drunk?

[Ilsa]

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water.

from The Burial of the Dead
T. S. Eliot

[paeng]

"Never, never, never, never, never!"--from Shakespeare's King Lear

[Bleak&Icy]

This passage comes from Nabokov's short story "Terror":

On the fifth day, after a bad night, I took time out for a stroll. I wish the part of my story to which I am coming now could be set in italics; no, not even italics would do: I need some new, unique kind of type. Insomnia had left me with an exceedingly receptive void within my mind. My head seemed made of glass, and the slight cramp in my calves had also a vitreous character. As soon as I came out of the hotel--Yes, now I think I have found the right words. I hasten to write them down before they fade. When I came out onto the street, I suddenly saw the world as it really is. You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception. Well--on that terrible day when, devastated by a sleepless night, I stepped out into the center of an incidental city, and saw houses, trees, automobiles, people, my mind abruptly refused to accept them as "houses," "trees," and so forth--as something connected with ordinary life. My line of communication with the world snapped, I was on my own and the world was on its own, and that world was devoid of sense. I saw the actual essence of all things. I looked at houses and they lost their usual meaning--that is, all that we think when looking at a house: a certain architectural style, the sort of rooms inside, ugly house, comfortable house--all this had evaporated, leaving nothing but an absurd shell, the same way an absurd sound is left after one has repeated sufficiently long the commonest word without heeding its meaning: house, howss, whowss. It was the same with the trees, the same with people. I understood the horror of a human face. Anatomy, sexual distinction, the notion of "legs," "arms," "clothes"--all was abolished, and there remained in front of me a mere something--not even a creature, for that is too human a concept, but merely something moving past.
[...]
Just as a man who is having a heart attack on a sidewalk does not give a hoot for the passersby, the sun, the beauty of an ancient cathedral, and has only one concern: to breathe, so I too had but one desire: not to go mad. I am convinced that nobody ever saw the world the way I saw it during those moments, in all its nakedness and terrifying absurdity. Near me a dog was sniffing the snow. I was tortured by my efforts to recognize what "dog" might mean, and because I had been staring at it hard, it crept up to me trustingly, and I felt so nauseated that I got up from the bench and walked away. It was then that my terror reached its highest point. I gave up struggling. I was no longer a man, but a naked eye, an aimless glance moving in an absurd world. The very sight of a human face made me want to scream.

Very Ligotiian, no?

[yellowish haze]

"A Jew came to his rabbi and asked: 'Rabbi, you are a very wise man. Tell me, is there going to be a war?' 'There will be no war,' replied the rabbi, 'but there will be such a struggle for peace that no stone will be left standing.'"

--a popular joke from the 1950's in the Soviet Union.

Apparently I have to know this for my next exam

[candy]

Boy, I'm glad I'm not in your class!! Will you post the answer when you figure it out?? It will bug me if I don't find out the answer.