Kindle Notes & Highlights
Dying, though – it’s one of the most beautiful things there is. It’s not scary or confusing like people say. I think they talk like that because the idea of eternal rest is too tempting. Because if they didn’t, then everyone would want to die.
But they don’t understand that your soul is actually light, and brilliant, and that’s what really scares them: you’re not bound to the same mundane hopes and worries that govern everyone else. All our desires and anxieties have been reduced to the quest for stillness, for bliss, for peace. For the lady. We’ve sacrificed everything for it, like monks. Or saints, more like it – just passing through, no longer of this world.
None of us was going anywhere. It’s a reality everyone seems to know and accept with a sense of resignation, but it was moving to see someone still losing sleep over it.
I heard them talking, but I stopped responding. People just don’t get it. They don’t understand that I’m not suicidal. I don’t want to kill myself, I don’t even want to die. I don’t want anything at all – I haven’t wanted anything for a long time. My desire’s all dried up. I’m dead in life, that’s all.
I have no idea when these things actually happened. I’ve been dragging a lot of time behind me. I know my memories are linked and blended together somehow, that they’ve delivered me into this muffled, feverish moment, but I’m finding it harder and harder to distinguish experience from dreams.
I’ve reached a crossroads in my life. It’s time for a drastic change of strategy.
I’m certain that the visions of hell you see in museums were invented by someone who’d gone cold turkey.
‘Bro, is this for real?’ I’d tell them. Look, there’s no way you’re going to force-feed me the sexual frustrations of some old Viennese cokehead and convince me that’s my cure. What I’ve got is called life, and nothing can cure me of that but the stuff I was shooting up five minutes ago. If the old fart had been doing heroin, they’d be giving me a prize right now. They say doing drugs is no way to live, because it kills you slowly – but life kills you slowly, buddy, and I’d rather live mine like this.
My favourite thing was how happy he was just to flop down next to you, to keep you company as the rush passed, and all he wanted in return was that you give him a scrap of food and take him out to piss. I think you could search the whole world over and never find a friend like that, like the friend I had back then.
The dead observe us with a mix of fascination and utter detachment. Most are no longer involved in earthly affairs. I think they must feel pity and tenderness towards us because we still are, because of how seriously we take everything. They see it all as if from behind a glass window, from the perspective of someone who no longer has anything at stake, no more obstacles to overcome, not even time itself.
Sometimes I get the sense that there are two people inside me: one – the one I identify as ‘me’ – trying to extinguish itself, which means shedding the weight of matter by using the quickest, most painless methods at his disposal, and another one, far more stubborn and vicious and evasive, who stays alive in spite of everything and drags me around wherever he goes.
What kind of love could ever compare to what you feel for Death, who adores us like a mother, who’s always ready to welcome us back into her womb?
I carry the tin around because if I don’t I’ll go crazy, and I carry the notebook because if I don’t I’ll be all alone. That would scare me for real.
I’m telling you, life throws you curve balls until the very end. I hesitated, wondering whether to just shoot up already and forget about everything that would happen next, or if I should go and open the door and deal with what the world was sending my way. It had to be something supremely important if it was announcing itself right at that moment, the moment when everything had come together for the grand finale.
This hadn’t happened to me for a long time, but even the best fisherman will starve to death in the desert.
There’s no solace or companionship in the voices of the dead. All you hear is their absence.
Normal people cling to stuff. Ever since I was very small, I understood that things will leave you of their own accord, so I clung to nothing.
I ask the girl why, if they’re dead, I can see them but they can’t see me. ‘The dead see only what they damn well please,’ she says. Which is something the living do as well.
I no longer know what I’m supposed to look for, or long for, make sense of, resolve. Those are pleasures reserved for the living.
If only you could find a way to live that would make life after death more comforting, more enjoyable.
There’s something enviable about the transient state of living, in the pleasure of being able to satiate your hunger with food, drown your sorrows with tears or drink, then succumbing to physical fatigue after hours of labour.
But I don’t know – and I’ll never know, because I didn’t make it to old age, and I never understood anything about life, either.
If I’d thought of all this before, maybe I would have done things differently, although who knows, maybe I would’ve done them exactly the same.
The idea of existing like this is terrifying. I don’t know if what scares me most is the thought of eternity, or that everything could stay just like this, static, never changing, remaining exactly as it was when I was alive.
Pleasures don’t last long, but pain passes too.
The living work alchemy with their desire, almost always by accident, and it’s a moving and unsettling spectacle. They make lives like ours, like mine, which start and end without us really understanding what happened to us. And it was this. This is what happened to us.
Life and death are a single continuum, two sides of the same coin.
If I’m ever reborn, I’ll do things differently, I think, although who knows, maybe I’ll do them exactly the same.
This withdrawal I feel, this nostalgia for the womb, like a sickness, must be what people mean when they talk about ‘life’.
I’m going to meet my mother again.
