The world is deep,
deeper than day can comprehend.
/"You'll do better, Licinius, not to spend your life
Venturing too far out on the dangerous waters,
Or else, for fear of storms, staying too close in
To the dangerous rocky shoreline."
/Truning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anacry is loosed upon the world ...
Surely some revelation must be at hand.
/What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Wither is it moving now? Wither are we moving? away from all suns? Are we not lplunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinate nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not bebcome colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
/The sun is cursed by all men jaded;
To them the worth of trees is - shaded!
/Slipp'ry ice
Is paradise
As long as dancing will suffice
/My mind is like a jade jar of ice,
Never invaded by even half a moat of dust
Though the jade jar be obscured without,
I pay no mind at all -
On the terrace of Immortals,
I climb straight to the highest level
Churchill: "August 14th 19944./ The P.M. was in a speculative mood today. When I was young," he ruminated, "for two or three years the light faded out of the picture. I did my work. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me. It helped me to talk to Clemmie about it. I dont like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I dont like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything. A few drops of desparation. And yet I dont want to go out of the world in such moments. Is much known about worry, Charles? It helps me to write down half a dozen things which are worrying me. Two of them, say, disappear, about two nothing can be done, so it's no use worrying, and two perhaps can be settled. I read an American book on the nerves, 'the Philosophy of Fate'; it interested me a great deal." I said: "Your trouble-I mean the Black Dog business-you got from your forebears. You have fought against it all your life. That is why you dislike visiting hospitals. You always aviod anything that is depressing." Winston stared at me as if i knew to much." "On one of his birthdays a few years before, in answer to my sister Diana's exclamation of wonderment at all the things he had done in his life, he asid: "I have achieved a great deal to have ahcieved nothing in the end." We were listening to the radio and reading the always generous newspaper eulogies. "How can you say that?" she said. He was silent. "There are your books," I said. "And your paintings," Diana followed. "Oh yes, yes, there are those." "And after all, there is us," we continued. "Poor comfort we know at times: and there are children who are greateful that they are alive." He acknowlaged us with a smile. . . ."
"Estragon: We always find someething, eh, Didi, to give us the impression that we exist?
Vladimir (impatiently): Yes, yes, we're magicians. But let us presevere in what we have resolved, before we forget."
Camus: "What then is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promsed land. This devorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men have thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct conection between this feeling and the longing for death ... The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his action. Beleif in the absurdity of existance must then dictate his conduct. It is ligitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as rapidly as possible an imcomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmoy with themselves ... But allowance must be made for those who, without concludeing, continue questioning [suicide]. Here I am only slightly indulgeing in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer "no" act as if they thought "yes". As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think yes in one way or another."
Nietzsche: "What distinguishes the common nature is that it unflinchingly keeps sight of its advantage, and that this thought of purpose and advantage is even stronger than its strongest drives; not to allow these drives to lead it astray to preform inexpiditious acts - that is its wisdom and self-esteem. In comparison, the higher nature is more unreasonable - for the noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing person does in fact succumb to his drives; and in his best moments, his reason pauses. An animal that protects its young at the risk of its own life or during the mating period follows the female unto death does not think of danger or death; its reason likewise pauses because the pleasure in its brood or in the female and the fear of being depreived of this pleasure dominate it totally; the animal becomes stupider than it normally is - just like the person who is noble and magnanimous. Such persons have several feelings of pleasure and displeasure so strong that they reduce the intellect to silence or to servitude: at that point their heart displaces their head, and one speaks thenceforth of 'passion'. (Occassionally we also encounter the opposite, the 'reversal of passion', as it were; for example, somebody once laid his hand of Fontenelle's heart and said, 'What you have here, my dear sir, is also brains.') The unreason or odd reason of passion is what the common type dispises in the noble, especially when this passion is directed at objects whose value seems quite fantastic and arbituary. He is annoyed by the person who succumbs to the passion of the belly, but at least he comprehends the appeal that plays the tyrant in this case; he cannot comprehend how anyone could, for example, risk health and honour for the sake of a passion for knowledge. The higher natures taste is for exceptions, for things that leave most people cold and seem to lack sweetness; the higher nature has a singular value standard. Moreover, it usually believes that the idiosyncrasy of its taste is not a singular value standard; rather, it posits its values and disvalues as generally valid and so beomces incomprehensible and impractible ... Now, when such exceptional people do not themselves feel like exceptions, how can they ever understand common natures and arrive at a proper estimate if the rule! ..."
"One must not anaylise onself while having an experience."
"The preponderence of pain over pleasure is the -cause- of that fictious morality and religion: but any such preponderance funishes the criterion for decadence"
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