Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

[ToALonelyPeace]

"What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges - the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet - horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the earth to be made of glass, to smatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst he would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one. . .Crime glistens in his eyeballs; his hands tighten in vain to strangle. Life is transmitted by leprosy : too many creatures for a single murderer. It is in the nature of the man who cannot kill himself to seek revenge against whatever enjoys existing. And failing, discarded Satan, he weeps, pounds his breast, bows his head; the blood he wanted to shed fails to redden his own cheeks whose pallor reflects his disgust with that secretion of hopes produced by the advancing species. His great dream was to destroy the days of Creations. . .he renounces his dream, collapses into himself, and yields to the elegy of his own failure: another order of excess is the result. His skin burns: fever fills the universe, his brain is on fire: the air is inflammable. His ills fill sidereal space; his griefs make the poles tremble. And whatever is allusion to existence, the most imperceptible breath of life, wrings from him a cry which compromises the music of the spheres and the movement of the stars."


---Flayed Alive, "A Short History of Decay" by E.M. Cioran

[ChildofOldLeech]

"Why don't we admit that our entire way of life is legalized robbery and that periodically millions of men who have never even heard of Fortnum's have to go out and get killed so that it will still be there for future generations of public school boys and their girlfriends. . .why not admit that if there were no such institutions as merchant banks and privately capitalized industry there wouldn't be any council flats for the handful that get home. . .why not admit that the whole of life is a frightening, hideous and chaotic shambles and that you struggle to the top of the dung-heap as best you can, admit that there is no such thing as morality or ethics except in philosophers' textbooks and that those textbooks only get written in countries where bellies are full; admit that there is no such thing as a "game" in life anywhere; that there never was and there never will be; it's all absurd and horrifying; you're an accident and I'm an accident and one day, as accidents, we feel sick and fall down dead. . .Yes, I should nauseate a lot of people if they could see and hear me now because I'm telling the truth; I've come to it the hard way, the long way round, and it's nauseating; they told me the truth was something beautiful, like Bach or Michelangelo; it isn't, it drives you mad; human reason was never constructed to deal with anything like this; you expected it to make sense and it doesn't, there's nothing there, you can't make sense out of nothing, you can't play cricket in it, the ball doesn't reach the bat, the players dissolve, they never existed, they were accidents, existence posits purpose; first God went out with a pop, now it's men, soon everything will go out; Descartes and Hegel must have been out of their minds, oh what am I going to do. . .I wanted the truth and now I've got it, it isn't there, I can't stand this another minute, I'm going mad; I'll play games, turn to stone, do anything, but get me out of this in one piece. . ."

- Robin Cook (Derek Raymond), The Legacy of the Stiff Upper Lip

[Druidic]

If I would die tonight who would care? Bill collectors, bill collectors! At least their concern would be sincere.
--Druidic

[faliol]

Lol! Druidic, I would care

[When_MP_Attacks]

MARY sat quietly and watched the handsome man's legs blown off; watched further as the great ship began to crumple and break into small pieces in the middle of the blazing night. She fidgeted slightly as the men and the parts of the men came floating dreamily through the wreckage out into the awful silence. And when the meteorite shower came upon the men, gouging holes through everything, tearing flesh and ripping bones, Mary closed her eyes.

- Charles Beaumont

[When_MP_Attacks]

It is impossible to love and be wise.

- Francis Bacon

[luxfugio]

"A line of water from one of the pumps arched down on the smoldering fire, and a woman's body suddenly floated up before it: such had been the fall. The body was quite horizontal as it passed through the air. Shimamura started back--not from fear, however. He saw the figure as a phantasm from an unreal world. That stiff figure, flung out into the air, became soft and pliant. With a dollike passiveness and the freedom of the lifeless, it seemed to hold both life and death in abeyance. If Shimamura felt even a flicker of uneasiness, it was lest the head drop, or a knee or a hip bend to disturb that perfectly horizontal line. Something of the sort must surely happen; but the body was still horizontal when it struck the ground. It was only then that he realized it was Yoko. She struggled against whatever it was, her free eye twitching. Blessing or punishment?"

Yasunari Kawabata, "Snow Country"

[ToALonelyPeace]

"I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever."

-Addie, from "As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner

[Bleak&Icy]

It is erroneous that propagation is supposed to be one of Nature's laws, if we imagine such nonsense our pride alone is to blame. Nature permits propagation, but one must take care not to mistake her tolerance for an enjoinder. Nature stands in not the slightest need of propagation; and the total disappearance of mankind--this being the worst consequence of a refusal to propagate--would grieve her very little, she would not more pause in her career than if the whole species of rabbits or chickens were suddenly to be wiped off the face of the earth. Thus, we no more serve nature in reproducing ourselves than we offend her in not doing so. Be amply persuaded of it, this wonderful propagation, inflated into a virtue by our preposterously overdrawn self-esteem, if viewed from the standpoint of Nature's functionings, becomes entirely superfluous, and a subject over which we ought to trouble ourselves as little as possible.

-- Marquis de Sade, Juliette (1797, trans. Austryn Wainhouse)

Happy New Year!

[ChildofOldLeech]

“Very early in my life it was too late.”

- Marguerite Duras