Lars Iyer's Blog, page 38
January 20, 2015
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, lo...
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
Consider this point carefully: nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.
But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.
Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life.
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
Cesare Pavese, from his journals
Drew Broussard reviews Wittgenstein Jr at TNBBC's The Nex...
January 19, 2015
Some quotations from Jens Bjørneboe:
Literature must hav...
Some quotations from Jens Bjørneboe:
Literature must have a religious dimension if it is really to be literature at all. An unmetaphysical poem is artistically speaking an unrealistic poem; it is false if it conveys nothing of life's macabre double bottom, of all things' ambiguity. If a writer is not clear that our whole crumb of a human life is one long wandering on thin ice over coal-black water, then everything he writes is boring. It is insignificant.
Arnulf Øverland at 70
I've been writing for eight years, and it is only now that I'm beginning to discover what I've actually let myself in for. It's incomprehensible that anyone engages in something which is so utterly impossible. Every word, every comma, every sentence is a problem. Nothing writes itself any more, every page I produce I regard with the very deepest suspicion.
from an interview in Aftenposten (1959)
It's well known that madness doesn't always express itself in a lack of logic, but just as often in the fact that logic is all that remains of reason; counting and ordering is all that's left of the lunatic's consciousness. The meaninglessness screams, but the pedantry is perfect. Everything is made by a mad schoolmaster.
from Powderhouse
Laughter means distance. Where laughter is absent, madness begins. The moment one takes the world with complete seriousness one is potentially insane. The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber, a dark place where dark things will happen to us, a horror show filled with bloody deeds of violence.
from Moment of Freedom
What you say about our artificially prolonged childhood –...
What you say about our artificially prolonged childhood – about immaturity – bewilders me somewhat. Rather, it seems to me that this kind of art, the kind which is so dear to my heart, is precisely a regression, a return to childhood. Were it possible to turn back development, achieve a second childhood by some circuitous road, once again to have its fullness and immensity – that would be the incarnation of an “age of genius,” “messianic times” which are promised and pledged to us by all mythologies. My goal is to “mature” into a childhood. This really would be a true maturity.
Bruno Schultz, in a letter, 1936.
January 15, 2015
melancholy, the contemplation of the movement of misfortu...
melancholy, the contemplation of the movement of misfortune, has nothing in common with the wish to die. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so at the level of art, where it is anything but reactive or reactionary. When, with rigid gaze, [melancholy] goes over again just how things could have happened, it becomes clear that the dynamic of inconsolability and that of knowledge are identical in their execution. The description of misfortune includes within itself the possibility of its own overcoming.
Sebald, untranslated foreword to a volume of his own essays
January 14, 2015
Podcast of Ray Monk and I discussing Wittgenstein Jr at t...
Podcast of Ray Monk and I discussing Wittgenstein Jr at the London Review Bookshop last August.
The true fight against oneself is against one's heaviness...
The true fight against oneself is against one's heaviness, one's gravity.
Susan Sontag, writing on Bresson
January 13, 2015
Steven Schwarzschild: Ethics means to have an alternative...
Steven Schwarzschild: Ethics means to have an alternative to reality.
The etymological root of the English 'happiness' is the M...
The etymological root of the English 'happiness' is the Middle English 'hap', which means luck, fortune or chance[...] [A] happy mode of being is one in which I am able to receive the fact of the world - its happening - in the right way: the happy are those who live this fact as something lucky or fortuitous, as something that could have been otherwise, but (happily) was not.
'Hap' can also mean 'absence of design or intent in relation to a particular event': what haps does so for no reason; it is literally graceful. The happiness in question is the happiness of living the fact that existence is unnecessary or gratuitous: not (empirical) happiness at the occurrence of this or that thing, but (transcendental) happiness at their happening.
[...]
My existing, my absolutely particular response to the groundlessness of existence, cannot be exchanged. It is non-relational and therefore in a sense it is entirely private, unique to me alone. Yet so is yours, and that of any other living being. What is common, in other words, is our singularity in the face of the fact of the world; we are absolutely substitutable right where and when we are most unique.
This is another way of understanding this idea of happiness: it is a happiness that singularises the self, but that does not exist except in common; it is the happiness, then, of the sharing of singularity, the happiness of our common exposure to the grace of the world. [...] Living in proper response to it would invovle the common appropriation of belonging itself: not any particular condition of belonging, but the fact of our being in common.
From Matthew Abbott's The Figure of This World
Living cheaply. - The cheapest and most inoffensive way o...
Living cheaply. - The cheapest and most inoffensive way of living is that of the thinker; for, to get at once to the main point, the things he needs most are precisely those which others despise and throw away -. Then: he is easily pelased and has no expensive pleasures; his work is not hard but as it were southerly; his days and nights are not spoiled by pangs of conscience; he moves about, eats, drinks and sleeps in proportion as his mind grows ever calmer, stronger and brighter; he rejoices in his body and has no reason to be afraid of it; he has no need of company, except now and then so as afterwards to embrace his solitude the more tenderly; as a substitute for the living he has the dead, and even for friends he has a substitute: namely the best who have ever lived. - Consider whether it is not the opposite desires and habits that make the life of men expensive and consequently arduous and often insupportable. - In another sense, to be sure, the life of the thinker is the most expensive - nothing is too good for him; and to be deprived of the best would here be an unendurable deprivation.
Nietzsche, Daybreak
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