. . . and we always fail to achieve an understanding that would allow us to rest.

— Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life

Nick gazed in the mirror and saw someone teeteringly alone.

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

I hear some making excuses for not being able to express themselves, and pretending to have their heads full of many fine things, but to be unable to express them for lack of eloquence. That is all bluff. Do you know what I think those things are? They are shadows that come to them of some shapeless conceptions, which they cannot untangle and clear up within, nor consequently set forth without: they do not understand themselves yet. And just watch them stammer on the point of giving birth; you will conclude that they are not laboring for delivery, but for conception, and that they are only trying to lick into shape this unfinished matter. For my part I hold, and Socrates makes it a rule, that whoever has a vivid and clear idea in his mind will express it, if necessary in Bergamask dialect, or, if he is dumb, by signs:

Master the stuff, and words will freely follow.

[Horace]

.sdf
— Montaigne, from “Of the Education of Children”
(Tr. Frame)

It is from the margins that we can see the center more clearly; it is from the perspective of what Michel Foucault once characterized as the “perverse implantation” that we may better observe what we call normal. In the state of crisis induced by the pain of being alone, it is more likely that we will clearly see the motives and ends of the lonely self, even when that self moves from despair to happier ways of being.

— Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life

Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money.

— Robbin Williams

………..                        ………………..Dare to be wise! Begin!
The man who would reform his life, but hesitates, is kin
Unto the rustic boar who waits until the stream is gone;
But ever rolling flows the stream, and ever will flow on.

— Horace

Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because the mental images of the objects and events that surround us, along with the images of the words and sentences that describe them, use up so much of our overburdened attention. But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states, the continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming of the most universal of melodies that only dies down when we go to sleep, a humming that turns into all-out singing when we are occupied by joy, or a mournful requiem when sorrow takes over.

— Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza

What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him would be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.

— Lydia Davis

Yes, I listen to the trees and hear what they say and I think that they hear what I say. Not what I say, since trees don’t speak English, but the trees are very aware of what I’m doing to them and to the ground around them. And by me I don’t mean Timothy Leary. They don’t talk that language.

— Timothy Leary

Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they will throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.

As when the light of waters in an urn,
Trembling, reflects the sun or moon, in turn
It flickers round the room, and darts its rays
Aloft, and on the panelled ceiling plays.

[Virgil]

And there is no mad or idle fancy that they will not bring forth in this agitation:

They form vain visions, like a sick man’s dreams.

[Horace]

The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere:

He who dwells everywhere, Maximus, nowhere dwells.

[Martial]

Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and privacy, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become heavier and more mature with time. But I find —

Ever idle hours breed wandering thoughts

[Lucan]

— that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their strangeness and foolishness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make even my mind ashamed of them.

..

— Montaigne
(Translated by Donald M. Frame)

BE PURE. Be Icarus and Dionysus both. Look into the face of others and ask – with your wings and with your eyes – for their pain. And when they offer up their suffering, their sorrow and grief, heartache and sadness, take it all into your mouth, your beak, and hold tight but careful like a stork carrying a baby. Bundle it all together and carry it away, up toward the sun, continuing toward the heat with a pureness of heart. Let it overtake you, let the sun burn the gift you’ve brought. Let it burn you as well, if it must. Sacrifice.

— Aaron Burch

The Canadian philosopher [Terence McKenna] recommended taking large doses of hallucinogens alone if possible, in the dark and without music or other forms of outside stimulation. He believed this was the only way for people to realize their full potential. In his book Food of the Gods (1992), McKenna asserts that early man’s ability to evolve from the apes stems from his partaking of the psilocybin-containing mushroom Stropharia cubensis. Five million years ago, “magic mushroom” consumption freed primates from the daily grind of survival and awakened their creative potential, resulting in both the development of language and religion and the invention of practical tools. At the same time, psychoactive mushrooms increased sexual desire and thereby increased the birth rate. Unfortunately, a climate change caused the mushrooms to disappear ten thousand years ago, and the baleful period of animal husbandry, male domination, and monotheism began.

— Ingo Niermann and Adriano Sack, The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends

The essayist was unconvinced that his occasional hashish experiments in the late 1920s had revealed any hidden truths in themselves, but did feel that they allowed him to explore the illusive surface of things. “The opium smoker or hashish eater experiences the power of imbibing at a glance a hundred sites from a single spot.” This is the so-called “profane illumination.” If experienced permanently as an addiction, it can make an individual “more suitable” for the daily struggle for existence. Addicts just look better, because “unkindness, fanaticism about being correct, and pharisaism” have disappeared. This “intensifying attractiveness” was for Benjamin a primary motive of addiction.

— Ingo Niermann and Adriano Sack, The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends

From hidden centers, from the depths it emerges: to rest, to move no more — : withdrawal, regression, aphasia. Hours are filled with the satisfied desire to drift along as formless life. To call this animalistic is to be mistaken: this process is far below the animals, below the reflexes, it is near roots, chalk, and stone.

Potent brains are not strengthened through milk but through alkaloids. An organ of such small size and great vulnerability, which not only approached the pyramids and gamma-rays, lions and icebergs, but created and invented them, cannot be watered like a forget-me-not; it will find its own supplies.

Myriads of molecules observed the harmony. Here the laws no longer acted under the veil of appearance; matter was so delicate and weightless that it clearly reflected them. How simple and cogent everything was.

— Ernst Jünger, Visit to Godenholm