Quotes

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Each self begins with a rift and a revelation

Suddenly I was alone with . . . I felt, that afternoon of my childhood, that a very serious event had just occurred. It was my first awakening, the first indication, the premonitory sign of consciousness. Before that I had been only a being. From that moment, I was more and less than that. Each self begins with a rift and a revelation.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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It is at night that the disinherited man triumphs

Whatever the nightmare, one takes a role in it, one is the protagonist, one is something. It is at night that the disinherited man triumphs. If we were to suppress bad dreams, there would be mass revolutions.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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streetlights * burning * down

73

[n.d.; 1929?]

The clock over there in the back, in the house deserted because everyone is asleep, slowly drops the clear, quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning. I haven’t gone to sleep yet, nor do I expect to sleep. Unless something catches my attention, in which case I will not sleep, or if my body weighs on me, and for that reason I cannot calm down, I lie in the shadow, which the vague moonlight of the streetlamps renders even more solitary, the muffled silence of my strange body. I don’t know how to think, because I am so sleepy, nor do I know how to feel, because of the sleep I don’t manage to get.

Everything around me is the naked, abstract universe, made of nocturnal negations. I am divided between being tired and being upset, and I manage to touch, with the sensation I am touching a body, a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things. At times my soul softens, and then the formless details of everyday life bob along the surface of my awareness, and I am tossing around on the surface of not being able to sleep. Other times, I wake from within the half-sleep in which I stagnated, and vague images of a poetic and involuntary color let their noiseless spectacle pour through my distraction. I don’t have my eyes entirely closed. A light that comes from far off limits my weak vision; it’s the streetlights burning down below on the abandoned sides of the street.

How I wish I could stop, sleep, substitute this intermittent awareness with better, melancholy things spoken in secret to someone who doesn’t know me!… How I wish I could stop, pass fluidly along the bank, the flow and reflow of a vast sea, in the visible coasts of the night in which one might sleep!… How I wish I could stop, be incognito and external, be the movement of branches in far-off walks, the tenuous fall of leaves, known more by their sound than by their falling, the fine, high sea far off, rolling, and all the indefiniteness of parks at night, lost among continuous tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness!… How I wish I could stop, be finished finally, but with a metaphorical survival, be it the page of a book, a single tress of loose hair, the shaking of the vine growing at the bottom of the half-open window, the unimportant steps in the fine gravel at the curve, the last, high smoke of the sleeping village, the driver’s forgetting his whip at the matutinal side of the road… The absurd, the confusion, the extinguishing — everything that isn’t life…

And I sleep, in my way, without sleep of repose, this vegetative life of supposition, and under my eyelids without rest there appears, like the quiet foam on a filthy sea, the distant reflection of the silent streetlights.

I sleep and I unsleep.

From my other side, there behind where I lie, the silence of the house touches the infinite. I hear the time fall, drop by drop, and no drop that falls hears itself. My physical heart, the memory of all I or it was reduced to nothing, physically oppresses me. I feel my head materially resting on the pillow in which I have been creating a valley. The contact between the skin of the pillowcase and my skin is like that between people in the shade. My very ear, on which I am resting, mathematically engraves itself against my brain. I blink from fatigue, and my eyelashes make an infinitesimal sound, inaudible, in the palpable whiteness of the raised pillow. I breathe, sighing, and my respiration takes place — it is not mine. I suffer without feeling or thinking. The house clock, a fixed place there in the depth of things, chimes the half hour, dry and meaningless. It’s all so much, it’s all so deep, it’s all so black and so cold!

Suddenly, like a child of Mystery, a rooster crows without knowing that it’s nighttime. I can sleep because within me it’s morning. And I feel my mouth smile, slightly disordering the soft folds of the pillowcase that holds my face. I can abandon myself to life, I can sleep, I can stop knowing myself… And through the new sleep that darkens me I either remember the rooster that crowed, or it’s the same rooster, crowing a second time.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

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Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more

In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap (between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins. No place works any different from any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws — need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain — are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other — perhaps muted, exaggerated, or distorted, yes, but there nonetheless, and thus a source of comfort.

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

— George Saunders, “The New Mecca” (from The Braindead Megaphone)

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the comfort of being small and being able to think about being happy

May all the Gods preserve me, until the moment in which this aspect of myself ceases, the clear and solar notion of external reality, the sense of my unimportance, the comfort of being small and being able to think about being happy.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

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I think we are climates above which pause threats of storms that take place elsewhere

I think we are climates above which pause threats of storms that take place elsewhere.

The empty immensity of things, the grand oblivion in heaven and earth…

– Bernando Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

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Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but . . .

Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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The Grammy/man-briefly-involved-with-a-Ding-Dong/penisless-man Coalition

in persuasion nation

1

A man and a woman sit in a field of daisies.

“Forever?” he says.

“Forever,” she says, and they kiss.

A giant Twinkie runs past, trailed by perhaps two hundred young women.

The woman leaps to her feet and runs to catch up to the Twinkie.

“The sweetest thing in the world,” the voiceover says, “just got sweeter.”

The man sits sadly in the field of daisies.

Luckily, a giant Ding-Dong runs past, trailed by perhaps two hundred young men.

The man leaps to his feet and runs to catch up with the Ding-Dong.

“But not to worry,” the voiceover says. “There’s more than enough sweetness to go around!”

The Ding-Dong puts his arm around the young man, and the young man smiles up at the Ding-Dong, and the Ding-Dong bends down and gives the young man a kiss on the head.

2

A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.

“Grammy’s here!” he shouts.

He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won’t be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where she luckily lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing in a rosebush.

“Timmy,” Grammy says feebly. “Call 911.”

Just then the bell on the microwave dings.

We see from the look on his face that Timmy is conflicted.

“Timmy dear,” Grammy says. “For God’s sake. It’s me. Your Grammy, dear.”

Timmy comes to his senses, takes his MacAttack Mac&Cheese from the microwave, and sits languorously eating it while listening to his headphones while playing his video game.

“Sometimes you just gotta have your MacAttack,” the voiceover says.

Grammy scowls in the bush. We see that she is a grouchy old unhip hag who probably wouldn’t have even been cool enough to let Timmy have his MacAttack, but would likely have forced him to eat some unhip old-person gruel or fruit.

Then fortunately Grammy’s head drops back, and she is dead.

4

Two best friends look at their penises under sophisticated microscopes.

“You call this Elongated?” says one man.

“Jim, I gained four inches,” says the other. “Perhaps you should try my brand.”

“What is your brand, Kevin?” says the other.

“My brand is, I hang a brick from my penis and stand for hour at the edge of the Grand Canyon,” says Kevin.

“Okay Kevin,” says Jim. “You’ve been my dearest friend since kindergarten. I’ll give it a try.”

Then we see Jim standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, brick dangling from his penis, while Kevin tiptoes toward Jim’s car, and a voiceover says: Pontiac Sophisto: So sophisticated, it might just make you trick your best friend into a dangling a brick from his penis!

While Jim is distracted by the pain of the brick on his penis, Kevin squeals away in Jim’s Sophisto. As Jim spins around to look, his penis rips off and plummets into the Grand Canyon. Jim smiles wryly, acknowledging Kevin’s trick but also Kevin’s good taste in cars, then starts down into the Grand Canyon, to retrieve and, hopefully, reattach his penis.

— George Saunders, selections from the story “In Persuasion Nation” (from the book In Persuasion Nation)

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a wrinkling of sputum scorpions

Those creatures all had sold their souls to a devil from Hell’s lower classes, greedy for sordidness and laxity. They lived the intoxication of vanity and idleness, and they died blandly amid cushions of words in a wrinkling of sputum scorpions.

— Bernando Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

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I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.

I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.

— George Orwell, 1984