189524
SuperGrey
@supergrey.eth #189524
Relax. Nothing is under control.
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Sartre, 'Nausea'
I always say that if you wanted to think the worst of a man, better not see him close to, because when you watch him getting stuck a little deeper you think it’s all just hopeless and in the end there’s no difference between drinking a cup of café crême outside a café, saving up to buy a house, or murdering one’s mother.
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Ah, look where I might and think what I might, there was no cause for rejoicing and nothing beckoned me. There was nothing to charm me or tempt me. Everything was old, withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay. Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals – and now this! How had this paralysis of hatred against myself and everyone else, this obstruction of all feeling, this mud-hell of an empty heart and despair crept over me so softly and slowly?
Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and exchange a few more or less insincere compliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being … the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all.
I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”
By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.
By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.
“… when you think about it, there’s no good reason to do anything.”
There is no point.
“Why do I do anything?” she says. “I’m educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I’m so smart I can negate any dream.”
There is no point.
“Why do I do anything?” she says. “I’m educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I’m so smart I can negate any dream.”
Murakami, 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'
“… people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they’re going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means for them to be alive if they were just going to go on living for ever? Why would they bother? Or even if they should bother, they’d probably just reckon, ‘Oh well, I’ve got plenty of time for that. I’ll think about it later.’ But we can’t wait till later. We’ve got to think about it right this second. I might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. And you, Mr Wind-up Bird: you might starve to death. One morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. See? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That’s what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.”
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
The mainstream manufactures people as a monoculture. It turns us out like cloned rows of apple trees on pesticide-manicured fields. The mainstream ‘trains’ people by pruning. It forces growth in standardised ways. The song that we sing from within the mainstream is thereby not our own song. It does not issue from the opened gates of the soul. And so our personal branches and cultural roots atrophy away. We yearn for connection with one another and with the soul. But we forget that, like the earthworm, we too are an organism of the soil. We too need grounding.
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
In the beginning of time the great creator, Reason, made the earth to be a common treasury, to preserve beasts, birds, fishes and man, the lord that was to govern this creation … Not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another … But … selfish imaginations … did set up one man to teach and rule over another. And thereby … man was brought into bondage, and became a greater slave to such of his own kind than the beasts of the field were to him. And hereupon the earth … was hedged into enclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made … slaves. And that earth that is within this creation made a common storehouse for all, is bought and sold and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respecter of persons, delighting in the comfortable livelihood of some and rejoicing in the miserable poverty and straits of others.
For the power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.
Aldous Huxley, 'Brave New World'
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
All the people on board are married
I sit and feel lonely. Sitting and feeling lonely is something I am a spectacular success at. I can do it for hours. Everyone is good at something.
It is said that the close study of stone will reveal traces of fires suffered thousands of years ago… I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed our lives are made suddenly clearer to us… Perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world is embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.
Inspired by real incidents, 'Decentralized Deceit' is a gripping tale that blends fact and fiction, shedding light on the complex world of DeFi exploits.
The first man who having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. For how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to us all, and the Earth itself to nobody.’