Unlabelled Passage Of The Day

"The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other."

--Kafka, The Trial
 
Bellerophon was the first melancholy hero of the ancient Greek world.

Homer says of him in the Iliad: 'But when Bellerophon, at last, himself / Had anger'd all the Gods, feeding on grief / He roam'd alone the Aleian field, exiled, / By choice, from every cheerful haunt of man.' The whole of melancholy is contained in these lines written or dictated by Homer. Persecution, isolation, asymbolia, misanthropy. And, above all, that heart which sadness devours like a wild beast hounding its prey. The autophagia of unhappiness. I am a man of the Old Country. I have never been able to prevent myself from replying 'present' when the sudden call of solitude and silence has come--that call which is always raised for me by the presence of shouting, screaming, jabbering, angrily stamping humanity, as it advances in nations to kill, or gathers in disorganized crowds to see killing done. Rare are the times when I haven't rashly hastened my departure. Those who see me slipping away in a trice wrongly suppose that this sudden flight is the product of anxiety. It is worse than anxiety: it is the sense of humanity.

Solitudo is an old Latin word that meant wilderness.

The call of solitude is one of the most irresistible voices that societies addressed to men from the earliest times.

Solitude is a universal experience. That experience is older than social life, for the whole of the first part of life, in the first kingdom, was a solitary life.

Saint Augustine wrote: 'Life before birth was an experience.'

In Chinese, the words 'reading' and 'alone' are homophones.

Alone with Alone.

Opening a book, he opened his door to the dead and welcomed them in. He no longer knew whether he was on earth or not.


--from The Silent Crossing, by Pascal Quignard (trans. by Chris Turner)
 
“For all intents and purposes, the power of the Library is infinite. Tonight we’re going to settle who inherits control of reality.”
 
“The old man was far older than the old lady, and it was obvious that he was also much crazier. He was bald, purplish, and completely toothless, his mouth like an obscene flabby asshole stuck into the middle of his face, and despite the coldness of the day, he wore neither a shirt nor an undershirt. His shoulders were rounded, and his chest was caved in as though he no longer had any vital organs, and his muscles were as shriveled as if he'd been drying out in the sun for weeks. All in all he was a pretty horrible sight as well as an alarming one. Lowell glanced round at the other yards that were visible from where he stood, half expecting to see more old people proliferating in various degrees of madness and nudity, like some kind of ghastly, pale fungus brought forth from the sterile soil by the sun, but there was no else to be seen. There weren't even any sounds.”
- L.J. Davis, A Meaningful Life
 
In his seminal essay “The Last Messiah”, Zapffe at one point quotes Swedish writer, painter and illustrator Albert Engström (1869 – 1940). The ill-fated John Bauer is often considered the Swedish equivalent of Norway’s Theodor Kittelsen. However, Kittelsen arguably has more in common with the prolific and multitalented Engström. As with Kittelsen and Zapffe, Engström’s work has a humorous as well as a dark side. What follows is my translation of an excerpt from Engström's “Thanatos”, an essay on death originally published, as far as I can presently determine, in 1927.

[…]
Once, a long time ago, I wrote about the heart of a pike. The maid came and said that the pike’s heart was moving as it lay on a table among other scraps. At that moment I did not have the time to go down to the kitchen, and so almost an hour passed before I went. The heart still lay there among the other viscera and I took it in my hand and started to manipulate it, massaging, squeezing, imitating what I imagined might be the rhythm of a pike’s heartbeat. I thought I felt some kind of response and so I kept on squeezing it, methodically, rhythmically. Suddenly the heart began to beat and pump out blood. With my watch in front of me, I determined that I held a living thing in my hand for at least three quarters of an hour. But at the same time Death was in my hand. I was alone in the kitchen and a wild longing flew into my soul to kiss the heart, to whisper something to it, to tell it: “We must meet!”

But in the next instant the heart of the pike lay there on the zinc table like a dead piece of meat and I went up to my room and lit my pipe – forgot all about it.

Such are humans.

But one day I myself encountered Death.
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Let’s act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.

Let’s develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let’s cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let’s adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren’t and don’t wish to be, and don’t even wish to be taken for being.

Let’s buy books so as not to read them; let’s go to concerts without caring to hear the music or to see who’s there; let’s take long walks because we’re sick of walking; and let’s spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.

Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquiet
 
indecipherable said:
Let’s act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.

Let’s develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let’s cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let’s adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren’t and don’t wish to be, and don’t even wish to be taken for being.

Let’s buy books so as not to read them; let’s go to concerts without caring to hear the music or to see who’s there; let’s take long walks because we’re sick of walking; and let’s spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.

Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquiet
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I've often thought Ligotti would appreciate the following passage from Pessoa's poem The Keeper of Sheep:

'I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn't exist,
That there are hills, valleys and plains,
That there are trees, flowers and grass,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a true and real ensemble
Is a disease of our own ideas.'
 
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