Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

O nosso "amor pela vida" é sempre, de alguma forma, amor não correspondido (...) A vida não se importa conosco, nem sabe que andamos por aí. Contrariamente ao que se diz, ela não dá nada de graça, tudo o que conseguimos é arrebatado. A vida não precisa de nós, nós a perseguimos, nos humilhamos, suplicamos, aceitamos tudo dela, os maiores sofrimentos. Muitos são capazes das piores atitudes morais apenas para conservá-la mais um pouco (...) Aos que perguntem "Mas, não amas a vida?", deveríamos responder, num viés mais poético: "É claro que a amo; sempre a amei. Eu sempre quis viver, mas é a vida que não me deixa viver, que me limita, machuca, me faz adoecer e me destrói. Não sou eu quem não quer viver, pois a vida é tudo o que eu queria. Eu quis construir e a vida derrubou tudo o que eu ergui; quis amar e a vida matou tudo o que eu amei. Não me digam que não amo a vida; é ela que não me ama, que não ama ninguém.
---Our "love for life" is always, in some way, unrequited love. (...) Life does not care about us, it does not even know of our whereabouts. Contrary to what is said, it gives nothing for free, everything we manage to obtain is snatched away from us. Life does not need us. We chase after it, we humiliate ourselves, we beg, we accept everything it makes us go through, the greatest sufferings. Many are capable of the worst moral acts just to preserve it a bit more. (...) To those who ask, "But, do you not love life?" we should answer, in a poetic way: "Of course I love life; I always did. I always wanted to live, but it is life that does not let me live, that limits me, that hurts me, that makes me ill and destroys me. It is not me who does not want to live, because life is everything I always wanted. I wanted to build and life tore down everything I built; I wanted to love and life killed everything I loved. Do not say that I do not love life; it is life that does not love me, that does not love anybody."
----Julio Cabrera
 
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“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishment on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naïve. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time had insisted that we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private matter dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.”
Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall
 
"Work is good because it brings non-existence, and that non-existence is the most tolerable of all the forms of matter in life. There is no other answer to hard work. And I know of almost no one who has studied the philosophy of life but does not finally come up with the proposition that the only thing that makes life tolerable, is hard work, so you don't know you are living. So, I characterize hard work as dope for life."
- Clarence Darrow, "The Darrow-Foster Debate"

"Business is the salt of life, according to a not-so-innocuous parable: only things that tend to rot need to be salted."
- Peter Wessel Zapffe, "On the Tragic" (my trans.)

"I am a pessimist, but I am a cheerful pessimist. I sometimes think that pessimism is my dope. I would hate to live without it. [...] I am never disappointed unless I am happy. Nothing can come out any worse than I expect."
- Clarence Darrow, "The Darrow-Foster Debate"

"Before a Stone Age grave where only the teeth remain, the optimist rapturously exclaims: "The smile can never die!" But the pessimist will also find that his outlook on life is confirmed: only the gnashing of teeth defies the law of impermanence."
- Peter Wessel Zapffe, "On the Tragic" (my trans.)
 
The world is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly gone. A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception and that the world owes him happiness. But the world cannot give what it does not have ...

Nisargadatta Maharaj
 
“Don’t build yourself an ivory tower” the moralists say.

But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain-shielding it from the blows of ‘reality’ so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding ‘me’ from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don’t they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom?

Nanamoli Thera
 
Yet, sometimes at night I get a feeling of claustrophobia; of being smothered by my own personality, of choking through being in the world. During these moments the universe seems a prison wherein I lie fettered by the chains of my senses and blinded through being myself.

It is like being pinned underneath the hull of a capsized boat, yet being affraid to dive deeper and get clear. In those moments it seems that there must be a way out, and that through sloughing off the personality alone can it be taken.

Cyril Connolly
 
Death, then, is the clue to authentic living, the eventual and omnipresent possibility which binds together and stabilizes my existence.... I anticipate death...by living in the presence of death as always immediately possible and as undermining everything. This full-blooded acceptance...of death, lived out, is authentic personal existence. Everything is taken as contingent. Everything is devalued. Personal existence and everything encountered in personal existence is accepted as nothing, as meaningless, fallen under the blow of its possible impossibility. I see all my possibilities as already annihilated in death, as they will be, like those of others in their turn. In face of this capital possibility which devours all the others, there are only two alternatives: acceptance or distraction. Even this choice is a rare privilege, since few are awakened by dread to the recognition of the choice, most remain lost in the illusions of everyday life. To choose acceptance of death as the supreme and normative possibility of my existence is not to reject the world and refuse participation in its daily preoccupations, it is to refuse to be deceived and to refuse to be identified with the preoccupations in which I engage: it is to take them for what they are worth—nothing. From this detachment springs the power, the dignity, the tolerance, of authentic personal existence.

Blackham
 
Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins.

Camus
 
In the small hours when the acrid stench of existence rises like sewer gas from everything created, the emptiness of life seems more terrible than its misery.

Connolly
 
As Anaxagoras says: ‘it is better to be born than not to be bom, for the sake of observing the heavens and the cosmos’. Diogenes proclaimed a similar intellectual optimism: ‘for the noble-minded every day is a celebration, the whole cosmos a shrine we enter from the moment of birth, with its sun, moon and stars, streams of fresh water and the plants and animals the earth bears; our life is the initiation into these mysteries, and should be tranquil and full of joy, but most of us desecrate it by constant complaints, gloom and anxiety’. What this leaves out of account is that the world consists not only of responses to nature, but also the impressions of human life, which surround each of us and prove the chief source of care. Long before the time of Diogenes this had been expressed by Aesop, if these remarkable verses are his: ‘How is anyone to escape you, life, unless he die? Your pain is thousandfold, and it is not easy to flee from it or to bear it; the loveliness nature gives you is blissful - earth, sea, stars, the courses of the moon and sun, but all the rest is only fear and suffering, and if some lucky chance comes to us, a nemesis is sure to follow.’ It would have been strange if the Greeks had failed to be enraptured by the beauty of nature, but they felt and thought more of the terrors of human life. (...)

According to Pindar life is ‘only the dream of a shadow’; ‘time hangs treacherously over mankind and rolls life’s tide away with it’. Sophocles says that man is nothing but a breath and a shadow. In his Ajax Odysseus mourns the hero’s dreadful fate, inflicted by Athena as a boastful proof of divine power, as if it were his own: ‘for I see that all of us, all who live, are no more than phantoms and flimsy shadows’. But in a famous chorus of the old men at Colonus, Sophocles, who was the friend of Herodotus, gives a much broader range to the complaint of life:

Not to be born is best, when all is reckoned,
But when a man has seen the light of day
The next best thing by far is to go back
Where he came from, and as quick as he can.
Once youth is past, with all its follies,
Every affliction comes on him,
Envy, confrontation, conflict, battle, blood,
And last of all, old age lies in wait to besiege him,
Humiliated, cantankerous,
Friendless, sick and weak,
Worst evil of all.

It would be an error to believe that Sophocles was the first to declare that not to be bom is better than to be born. Several tragedies of Euripides, in which the same expression (me phunai )occurs, may well be older than Oedipus at Colonus. Indeed, at some uncertain date, Homer was supposed to have replied to the question what was best for mankind: ‘above all, not to be born, or else to pass through Hades’ gate as soon as may be’.

In that enigmatic mythical dialogue between Midas and his captive Silenus, originally from a lost work of Aristotle’s, but used in Plutarch’s Consolation to Apollonius (Chapter 27), the King of Phrygia asks the demigod what is best for man and most to be desired. After long silence and insistent urging the answer comes: ‘Frail offspring of toil and misery, why force me to tell you what it is better not to know? For there is least grief in life if each is ignorant of his misfortune; but the best thing for all mankind is not to be born, and the next best is to die as soon as possible after birth.’ Plutarch himself adds: ‘One might go on with countless examples of the same kind, but there is no need to make a long list.’ In other nations it is very rarely, and only in extreme anguish, that anyone is said to have cursed the day they were born.

There are many anecdotes, amounting almost to an anthology of Greek pessimism, to confirm that not to be is better than to be, and that being able to die is a grace from the gods given as the reward of noble deeds.

Jacob Burckhardt
from The Greeks and The Greek Civilization
 
Mother writes to me from Obersdorf that she is disturbed by the little word nichts [nothing], which is beginning to appear with ever-greater connotations. For example on posters: “Das Volk ist alles—du bist nichts.” [The nation is everything—you are nothing.] That would then be a totality composed of zeroes.

You certainly get that impression at times. The game that the nihilists play is becoming more and more transparent. The high stakes force them to show their cards and often for no reason.

***
Concerning marionettes and automatons—the decline in that direction is preceded by loss. This hardening is well depicted in the folktale about the glass heart.

The vice that has become commonplace leads to automatism, as it did so terribly in the case of the old prostitutes who became pure sex machines. Something similar is emanating from the stingy old men. They have sold their souls to material things and a life of metal. Sometimes a particular decision precedes the transition; man rejects his salvation. A widespread vice must be the basis for the general transition to automatism and its threat to us. It would be the task of the theologians to explain this to us, but they are silent.

***
During these past years, solipsism has emerged as a particularly difficult hurdle in the evolution of my thought. This is not only a product of isolation, it is also related to a temptation to embrace misanthropy, a trait that one cannot resist strongly enough in oneself. When surrounded by these crowds who have renounced free will, I feel more and more alienated, and sometimes it seems as if these people were not even there or that they were merely specious outlines constructed of half-demonic, half-mechanical materials.

***
The details included a passage about alcohol that I liked. Long quotations without sources are included claiming that the irresistible attraction of alcohol is not caused by physical enjoyment, but by its mystical power. It is thus not depravity that leads the unfortunate man to it, but rather hunger for spiritual power. Drink gives the poor and uneducated what others derive from music and libraries: it provides them with enhanced reality. It leads them from the edges of reality into its innermost workings. For many, this narrow zone in which they experience a breath of air is a place close to the realm of inebriation. Consequently, people make a considerable mistake in thinking they can combat drunkenness as a species of gluttony focused on liquid.

***
Have been reading documents and contemporary accounts of events during the French Revolution. The fate of the royal family is so melancholy and opens up such depressing insights into the shame of the human race. It is as if one were seeing swarms of rats surrounding defenseless victims, ultimately to pounce on them.

***

In the evening heard a lecture by a little Mauritanian with a certain cynical complacency who spoke about propaganda techniques used to influence the masses.

Th is type of man is certainly novel, or at least in comparison to the nineteenth century, downright new. The advantage that people like this truly possess lies in their negative qualities. They have thrown off the moral baggage sooner than the majority of other people and introduced the laws of mechanical engineering into politics. But this advantage will be overtaken—not by moral human beings, who are necessarily inferior to them relative to their unrestrained violence—but rather by people just like them who have learned at their feet. Ultimately, the stupidest man says to himself, “if he respects nothing, then why should he insist we respect him?”

It is, therefore, an error to expect religion and piety to restore order. Animalistic tendencies are produced at the zoological level, and demonic ones on the demonic level. This means that the shark is devoured by the leviathan and the Devil by Beelzebub.

***
Finished reading the first volume of the Causes Célèbres, published in Amsterdam in 1772 by M. Richet, former attorney in parliament. In the descriptions of the trial brought against Brinvilliers, I found the sentence, “Les grands crimes loin de se soupçonner, ne s’imaginent même pas” [Great crimes, far from being suspected, are unimaginable]. That is quite right and stems from the fact that crime increases at the same rate that it rises from the level of bestiality and acquires intellect. The clues also disappear to the same degree as its animal origins fall away. The greatest crimes depend on combinations that are superior to the law in points of logic.

Crime also shifts from the deed to a state of being, reaching levels where it exists as an abstract spirit of evil in pure cognition. Finally, interest itself wanes and evil is done for evil’s sake. Evil is celebrated. Then there is also the face that the question “cui bono?” [who benefits?] no longer provides a guiding principle—it is only one force in the universe that it benefits.

Ernst Jünger
A German Officer in Occupied Paris The War Journals, 1941-1945
 
Why do normal people normally react with panic and horror to the idea of cessation of becoming, or cessation of consciousness?

There are at least two reasons. There is first the failure to see both sides of life, the negative/destructive as well as the positive/ constructive, which are (as it were) the obverse and reverse of each piece of experience. It is a refusal to face the ambivalence of experience, and a putting on of blinkers to shut out, as far as one can, what is disturbing. It is by this that life is made to look nice, and appears tolerable. The process is largely automatic and subconscious, so it is seldom ever enquired into. With the blinkers on one does not see what is unwelcome and one quickly forgets the unwelcome that intrudes.

And here I want to distinguish two kinds of suffering: (1) enjoyable suffering and pain (the arduousness of exhausting sports, self mortification, “being ill,” masochism and sadism, etc.), which are not properly suffering because they are enjoyed and welcomed; and (2) horror or nausea, which is all those things (whatever they may be, and they vary with different people) that produce horror, nausea, and vertigo, because they are absurd and menace the core and pattern of our personal existence. Everyone knows that border across which he cannot go, even in thought, and it is that, not the former, that people automatically shut out and cannot face. Yet one knows at times (in the middle of the night, perhaps, when one is sleepless, or on encountering some revolting experience) that this horror haunts every form of experience (always and ever), and hastily one readjusts the blinkers that had slipped. Put the beautiful before you and the horror behind you. Yes, but then I shall not dare to turn round.

The world is a bad place. Is it? But it seems that this haunting, this self-delusion by wearing blinkers, is not an attribute of the world. The haunting is in consciousness itself, in its very nature. Just as when I set up any object in the sunlight a shadow is cast (because it is the nature of sunlight to cast shadows), so anything that comes into the light of consciousness casts a shadow of the unknown. It is in the unknown that the horror resides in the dark of knowledge where the patterns can no longer be traced, where chaos resides, and whence utterly hostile systems may emerge, devour, and digest us.

Nanamoli Thera
 
The inscription from a sundial is appropriate for this attitude that awaits judgment: “It is later than you think.”
*
The countless mines that still carpet this town continue to do damage. For example, recently a Russian was found at the edge of the road with his legs blown off . Because detonators were discovered on him, he was immediately executed— a gesture that may have mingled humanity with bestiality, but which correlates with the decline in our ability to discriminate moral categories. The realm of death becomes a depository: There we stick anything that seems upsetting where it won’t be seen again. But that may well be wrong.
*
It is odd how people can distance themselves from the body, from its muscles, nerves, ligaments, as though it were an instrument made up of keys and strings. In that state one listens like a stranger to the melody played by fate. This talent always carries the danger of sustaining injury.
*
Breakfast with the Morands; Countess Palffy, Céline, Benoist-Méchin also there.
The conversation tended toward ominous anecdotes. Benoist-Méchin told how his car had skidded on some ice, and he had crushed a woman against a tree as she was walking with her husband. He took the couple into his car to drive them to the field hospital and during the journey heard the man sobbing and groaning more than the woman.

“I hope you are not hurt too?”

“No, but a pelvic fracture—that means at least three months in the hospital— what an expense. And what’s more, who’s going to cook for me all that time?”

The examination revealed that it was luckily only internal lesions but that the healing would still take eight weeks. After that time, the minister visited the woman to inquire about her health, and he found her wearing mourning. Her husband had died of some gastric complications in the meantime. When he tried to express his condolences, she responded: “Oh please stop it. You don’t know what joy you have brought me.”

We talked about the wives of prisoners of war as well. Just as the Trojan War has become the mythical model of every historical war, the tragedy of returning soldiers and the figure of Clytemnestra constantly recur. A woman who hears that her husband is to be released from prison camp sends him a little parcel of delicacies as a love token. In the meantime, the man returns earlier than expected and discovers not only his wife but also her lover and two children. In the prisoner of war camp in Germany, comrades divide the contents of the parcel and four of them die after consuming the butter she had laced with arsenic.
*
...the observation that struck me today: that human economy forces us to exploit life, like those coal deposits that are remnants of prehistoric forests, or oil fields, and guano coasts, and the like. At such sites, train and shipping lines converge, and swarms of newcomers then settle. When viewed from the perspective of a distant astronomer, over the passage of time, such a spectacle looks like the activity of a swarm of flies that has picked up the scent of a huge cadaver.
*
Great plans of destruction can only succeed when they parallel changes in the world of morality. Man must continue to sink in value, must become metaphysically indifferent, before the transition to mass extermination as we are experiencing it today becomes total annihilation. Just as our entire situation was predicted by Scripture, so too was this specific one—and not just in the description of the Flood but also in that of the destruction of Sodom. With that God says explicitly that He wishes to spare the city as long as ten just men can still be found there. This is also a symbol of the immense responsibility of the individual in our age. One can guarantee the security of untold millions.
*
Then I read John 4:50, which was thoroughly appropriate for this commemorative day: “thy son liveth.” Pondered this. The Master is speaking to the unbelievers, which makes these momentous words inadequate. In order to convince their dull wits, he must make visible the truth of the corporeal revelation: the corpse must be resurrected. People thus expect cheap tricks from him in all things—including an earthly kingdom. The Prince of Light must cloak his words and deeds in shadows so that men’s eyes can sense their true power. Even his miracles are parables.
*
Following our conversation, Hielscher sends me excerpts from the journals of Leonardo along with some prophecies. One passage says this about human beings:

“In their boundless conceit, they even want to fly to heaven, but the heavy weight of their limbs will keep them earthbound. Nothing will remain on the earth nor in the water that they will not hunt down, root out, or destroy. Nor will anything be spared that they can take from one land and haul into another. Their bodies will serve as tombs and entranceways for all living things they have killed.”
*
I have to comfort myself by saying that, although the number of coincidences is infinite and unpredictable, in every combination, they probably lead to the same result. When measured by this result, rather by than its individual moments, the sum of a life produces a fixed quantity, namely the image of fate that we are destined for, and which—when viewed temporally—seems to be made of a series of accidental events. When viewed metaphysically, such points do not exist in the course of our life, any more than they do in the flight path of an arrow.

Then we have great minds like Boethius, who provide a theological resolution to this labyrinth. As long as we follow our destiny, chance is powerless; we are guided by our trust in Providence. If we lose this virtue, chance is set free and attacks us like armies of microbes. Hence, the regulatory function of prayer, as an apotropaic force. Chance remains crystallized, calculable.
*
During the midday break visited the dog cemetery located on one of the small islands in the Seine near the Porte Lavallois. At the entrance stands a monument to the Saint Bernard, Barry, who saved the lives of over forty hikers lost in the snow. He stands in stark contrast to Becerillo, the huge attack dog who mauled and killed hundreds of naked Indians. Man, with all his virtues and vices, is reflected in the animals he breeds.
*
Possessions require the strength to possess—nowadays who wants to keep up a castle, be surrounded by servants, or collect masses of objects? The nearness of the world of carnage is relevant here. Anyone who has ever seen a metropolis hit by a meteor and go up in flames will look at his house and his furniture with new eyes. Perhaps we will see the day when people offer each other their property as presents.
*
I visited the cemetery and, among the graves noticed that of W., a man with whom my father went to court over land disputes. Now both are lying in the same earth and returning to it. What is lef t to us from this life if we do not accumulate worth that can be exchanged for gold at the tollgate to death’s realm, to be exchanged for eternity?

*
Had a thought as I was observing the observers: I wonder whether invisible and extremely menacing life-forms exist for which you are museum exhibits and collectible objects?

[Pessoa: Who knows for what supreme forces – gods or demons of Truth in whose shadow we roam – I may be nothing but a shiny fly that alights in front of them for a moment or two? A facile hypothesis? Trite observation? Philosophy with no real thought? Maybe. But I didn’t think: I felt. It was carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror that I made this ludicrous comparison.]


Ernst Jünger A German Officer in Occupied Paris The War Journals, 1941-1945
 
Sydney Smith on suicide sounds most educative—on the condition that he is approached not too hastily so as to avoid lack of reaction (objectivity) or inappropriate reaction (immediacy). One needs to be subjective enough to taste the horror of the human situation one's own situation—and reflexive enough to face it without panic.[*] And to think that human birth is accounted by the Buddha a good destiny, hard to come by!

Nanavira Thera

* The relationship between these four attitudes—objectivity, immediacy, subjectivity, and reflexion—is worth consideration. At first sight it might seem that there is no difference between immediacy and subjectivity, or between objectivity and reflexion. Subjectivity and objectivity, certainly, are opposed; and so are immediacy and reflexion. But immediacy (which is naive acceptance of whatever is presented) is compatible with objectivity, as we see from Thomas Huxley's advice to the scientist: 'Sit down before fact as a little child'—; and reflexion is compatible with subjectivity (for subjectivity is 'being oneself', and reflexion, being 'self awareness', is within subjectivity).

In emotional excitement objectivity and reflexion alike tend to vanish, and subjectivity then approximates to immediacy. It is this that gives subjectivity its bad name; for few people know of any subjectivity beyond emotional immediacy. Their escape from emotion is towards objectivity, in the form of distractions, rather than towards reflexion, which is the more difficult way of self control. Goethe once described the advice 'Know Thyself' (inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi) as 'a singular requisition with which no man complies, or indeed ever will comply: man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals—to the world about him'.
 
"Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade. And only then do you realise you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person that you see coming out of the gates in a Melies film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been. "



Mircea Cartarescu. Solenoid. p 144
 
One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day.
For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark.
Light of a kind came then from the one high window.
Under it still the stool on which till he could or would no more he used to mount to see the sky.
Why he did not crane out to see what lay beneath was perhaps because the window was not made to open or because he could or would not open it.
Perhaps he knew only too well what lay beneath and did not wish to see it again.
So he would simply stand there high above the earth and see through the clouded pane the cloudless sky.
Its faint unchanging light unlike any light he could remember from the days and nights when day followed hard on night and night on day.
This outer light then when his own went out became his only light till it in its turn went out and left him in the dark.
Till it in its turn went out.

Samuel Beckett
Stirrings Still

PS: This even feels like something only someone of advanced age could have written (Beckett was in his eighties when he wrote this). Those words are the acceptance of the tighter and tighter grasp of nothingness
 
Some aspects of life are insubstantial if you look at the bigger picture, and the wicked indifference of the world. And yet, to defend our expectations, even though they are unreasonably fictional and selfish, we end up cannibalizing our very own existence. It feels like we're inside an omnidirectional barrier that, from time to time, is so far away, our consciousness registers it as nonexistent. Are those moments anything but fabricated happiness? And then the barrier encroaches, and that bubble shatters into shards of painful revelations. The revelations themselves are meaningless, since they're not the solution to anything, but rather bloody visages of the problems of conscious life.

It seems we have an insatiable capacity for happiness, and in doing so, we suffocate ourselves in unhappiness that perpetually concentrates as we go on.
 
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