Tag: q

sciencevevo:

“Don’t you understand that the overall disaster is much too great to be moaned and groaned about? I can grieve or feel bad if [my cat] is sick, or if you are not well. But when the whole world is out of joint, then I merely seek to understand what is going on and why, and then I have done my duty, and I am calm and in good spirits from then on. None are obliged to do more than they can. […] This giving oneself up completely to the headaches and miseries of the day is completely incomprehensible and intolerable to me. […] A fighter is precisely a person who must strive to rise above things, otherwise one’s nose will get stuck in every bit of nonsense.”

— Rosa Luxemburg, in a 1917 letter to Luise Kautsky, written from jail while she was imprisoned for her anti-war activities
(via bildungstrieb)

principleofplenitude:

““We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspenses, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible. Look!” With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers, he took hold of my pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on his board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and families, games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small world. For a while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through its evolutions before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making treaties and fighting battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was indeed a crowded stage, a moving breathless drama. Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artist’s skill, made up a new game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships and entanglements. The second game had an affinity with the first, it was the same world built of the same material, but the key was different, the time changed, the motif was differently give out and the situations differently presented. And in this fashion the clever architect built up one game after another out of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself and every game had a distant resemblance to every other. Each belonged recognizably to the same world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet each was entirely new. ‘This is the art of life,“ he said dreamily. “You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands.””

— Hermann Hesse, from Steppenwolf (1927)

kuanios:

“All unnecessary weight is eliminated… . Even the brain cells needed for song are lost and replaced seasonally in some birds.
—All the Birds of North America, p. 63 At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pyjamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this thoughtless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.”

— “After Visiting Hours”, Leon Weinmann.

deep-dive:

“Every living thing has two bodies these days – you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it. You breathe something in, and what you breathe out is something else. Your first body is the one belonging to … the place you live in, made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is … a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence – it is a version of you. It is not a concept, it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of the emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance. Your first body could be sitting alone in a church in the centre of Marseille, but your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container in the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs. It is understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.”

— Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body

dostevsky:

“The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorised new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

memoryslandscape:

“The loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality. I have said earlier that one person might hear more and another less of the vast melody of life; accordingly, the latter has a smaller or lesser duty in the great orchestra. The individual who could hear the entire melody would be at once the loneliest and the most common, for he [or she] would hear what no one else hears and yet only because he [or she] would grasp in its perfect completeness that which others strain to hear obscurely and only in parts.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “On Solitude,” The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer (Modern Library, 2005)