02:15"Summoned by conscious recollection, she
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,
the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
embracing. He holds her tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.
Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.
They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it. They are tender
with each other, afraid
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.
They feel themselves at the center of a powerful
and baffled will. They feel
they are an almost animal,
washed up on the shore of a world—
or huddled against the gate of a garden—
to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted." — “Misery and Splendor,” Robert Hass (via clavicola)

22:50"The brute is much more content with mere existence than man; the plant is wholly so; and man finds satisfaction in it just in proportion as he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly, the life of the brute carries less of sorrow with it, but also less of joy, when compared with the life of man; and while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom from the torment of care and anxiety, it is also due to the fact that hope, in any real sense, is unknown to the brute. It is thus deprived of any share in that which gives us the most and best of our joys and pleasures, the mental anticipation of a happy future, and the inspiriting play of phantasy, both of which we owe to our power of imagination. If the brute is free from care, it is also, in this sense, without hope; in either case, because its consciousness is limited to the present moment, to what it can actually see before it. The brute is an embodiment of present impulses, and hence what elements of fear and hope exist in its nature—and they do not go very far—arise only in relation to objects that lie before it and within reach of those impulses: whereas a man’s range of vision embraces the whole of his life, and extends far into the past and future." — On the Sufferings of the World - Wikisource

23:54

19:22

10:04"In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others around 500 B.C., psyche and nous begin to coalesce. It is now the conscious subjective mind-space and its self that is opposed to the material body. Cults spring up about this new wonder-provoking division between psyche and soma. It both excites and seems to explain the new conscious experience, thus reinforcing its very existence. The conscious psyche is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. It becomes an object of wide-eyed controversy. Where is it? And the locations in the body or outside it vary. What is it made of? Water (Thales), blood, air (Anaximenes), breath (Xenophanes), fire (Heraclitus), and so on, as the science of it all begins in a morass of pseudoquestions. “So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology." — Julian Jaynes’s Theory of Conciousness and the Bicameral Mind

23:37"An interesting and effective allegory is to consider the human nervous system as a kind of computer hardware. Each of us is born with a basic operating system, heartbeat, digestion, breathing, etc. Then, depending upon the circumstances of our birth, the software installed as we grow up is as varied as there are people on the planet. And in some cases, there can be enormous software conflicts, viruses, and even software that doesn’t run properly on the system." — The Necessity of Disillusionment | SupremeBoundlessWay

20:22"

We used to live in a cloud of unawareness, in delicious complicity. Things happened with sudden, wild, enchanted recklessness. I’d end up in Paull’s arms, hardly aware of what had happened.

This recklessness was now absent in Camille, and thus in me. Could I now, prey to my excited senses, observe her coldly, as she could undoubtedly observe me?

" — Le Mepris (1963)

(Source: youtube.com)

16:59"I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope— an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford’s greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one’s past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world." — John Fowles, The Magus

12:57"Octavio Paz and his splendid essay “Twilight of Revolution” (1974): The twilight of revolution arises from a crisis of linear time. The collapse of the future. Youth movements spring up in defense of the present. An explosion of sensuality—the body is the present. The crisis of the avant-garde in art. The avant-garde seeks perpetual novelty and turns it into the tyranny of the new. All revolutions degenerate into regimes….There is no art that doesn’t create style and there is no style that doesn’t annihilate art in the end….What remains? Above all the defense of dying mortals—humor." — A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska

12:47"The male moth as a rule lacks an alimentary canal. He doesn’t need it. The cluster of nerves on his head leads him unfailingly to the female through sense of smell. He can recognize the scent at twelve kilometers. He fertilizes her and then dies. That’s the high point of his life. It’s his life’s time. Biology determines the time of every living creature. Time equals the time of every individual life and anatomical structure.
Humans also move inexorably toward their goal—toward death. In it they are fulfilled. Only, unlike the moth, they stumble en route." — A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska