11-9n:

anthropofugal:

“Melancholy of Anatomy. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: saying no to the world as it is (or, Schopenhauer’s tears); saying yes to the world as it is (or, Nietzsche’s laughter); and refusing to say either “yes” or “no” (or, Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping – what other responses are adequate to a world that seems so indifferent?”

— Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism

!!!

bemusedbibliophile:

“The process of writing, however, depends on the ego’s depletion. To write is to be full of error and struggle and doubt and revelation and shock, to make a record of thinking but mostly a record of being thoughtless, to be shipwrecked in a watery expanse of derivation and imitation and only (if you are lucky) to wash up onto surprise uncharted islands of whatever is original or previously unknown. So much about writing is beautifully eviscerating, too, like sex and dying and history and big landscapes are beautifully eviscerating, in that it doesn’t matter who you are inside of it when you are completely inside of it. The Alps, orgasms, and sentences are indifferent to who we think we are. Writing is a vacation in the mistaken. It is what it is because it is so often wrong. It is a mode of emptying time of action and filling it instead with letters, words, syntaxes and grammars that are never yours to begin with and only rarely can be. To write is to be submerged in the common materials of language and always feel half-drowning there, only rarely getting to come up for what might finally be a perfect breath.”

— Anne Boyer in Practice Catalogue (via blackreconstruction)

decadent-romanticism:

“The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also by chance. They will die. What they think, do, and say is limited and is a mixture of good and evil. I have to know this with all my soul and not love them less. I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things. We want everything which has value to be eternal. Now everything which has a value is a product of a meeting, lasts throughout this meeting and ceases when those things which met are separated. That is the central idea of Buddhism (the thought of Heraclitus). It leads straight to God. Meditation on chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death. Is there a single thing in me of which the origin is not to be found in that meeting? Only God. And yet again, my thought of God had its origin in that meeting. Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity. The theories about progress and the ‘genius which always pierces through’ arise from the fact that it is intolerable to suppose that what is most precious in the world should be given over to chance. It is because it is intolerable that it ought to be contemplated. Creation is this very thing. The only good which is not subject to chance is that which is outside the world. The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence–that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time. The woman who wishes for a child white as snow and red as blood gets it, but she dies and the child is given over to a stepmother.”

—

Chance, Simone Weil.

Undoubtedly, they saved this essay for the very end of the anthology. If you are meat, this essay is a knife. Everything about it is impermanent and beautiful. The essential premise for enjoying a certain kind of roasted, delectable sadness.

(via sylvides)