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Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.
and there, at some point between the madman’s own particular and therefore uncommunicated ramblings, meaningless to everyone but the madman himself, who found them fascinatingly relevant, and the genre novel’s fixed formulations and clichés, which had become clichés by being familiar to everyone, was the domain of literature.
Liberty’s something you take. If it’s given, then you’re a slave.
Moralizing had never created anything of its own, all it did was reject the created. And the created was the same as life itself. Why reject life?
And writing was such a fragile thing. It wasn’t hard to write well, but it was hard to make writing that was alive, writing that could pry open the world and draw it together in one and the same movement.
Nazism was the last major utopian political movement, and it showed itself in nearly every way to be destructive, it has made all subsequent utopian thinking problematic if not impossible,
everything took place intuitively, I began with a blank page and a will to write, and ended up with the novel as it was. In that there lies a belief in the intuitive that is as good as blind,
the tyranny of good intent. All we can do is try for the best, it’s impossible to imagine any other way, but the consequences are beyond our control.”
The thoughts that hold together the I can be dissolved in the acts of reading and writing, though in two different ways, in the first instance by entering that which is alien and comes from without, and in the second instance by entering that which is alien and within us, which is the language at our own disposal, in other words the language in which we say I.
then moved on and picked up half a dozen eggs the box said came from “cage-free hens indoors,” prompting me to scan the other kinds to see if there were any from “mistreated hens crammed together in cages,” which didn’t seem to be the case,
That’s what money bought, lots of space and distance from others. But not too much space and not too much distance. In the forests you could have as much space as you wanted and there could be miles to the nearest neighbor, but no one with money would ever dream of living there. Space and distance were valuable only if there were other people nearby who had a lot less space and lived a lot closer to each other.
I knew, too, that what the novel can do, and which perhaps is its most important property, is to penetrate our veils of habit and familiarity simply by describing things in a slightly different way,
Meaning is not something in itself, but a feeling that may arise, and the coherence on which it is dependent is relative and may be based on misunderstanding as well as understanding, superstition as well as true belief, illusion as well as reality, immorality as well as morality.
This is the goal: to work other thoughts in behind the protective wall formed by prejudice, which is to say general, unreflected opinions. That protective wall cannot be penetrated by argument, for it is not made of arguments. It is made of a sense of what is right and wrong, what is decent, what is appropriate.
But he is sixteen years old, his poetry is bound to be poor, the buildings he draws in detail cannot possibly match the work of a trained architect, obviously he is a dilettante, but what sixteen-year-old is not?
We need to be alert whenever events shape themselves into narratives, for narratives belong to literature and not to life, and occurrences of the past seep into and absorb expectations of the future, for the true present stands open and knows as yet no consequence.
But what is this “bad” that we do not embody? What is this “evil” that we do not express? The very formulation is indicative of how we humans think in terms of categories, and of course there is nothing wrong with that as long as we are aware of the dangers.
No matter how broken a person might be, no matter how disturbed the soul, that person remains a person always, with the freedom to choose. It is choice that makes us human. Only choice gives meaning to the concept of guilt.
Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralization of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding heaping together of the laborers, within a given space; that therefore the swifter the capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the dwellings of the working-people.
And in spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days. As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together.
What do we do if out of all this a yearning arises for something else? A more real reality, a more authentic life? Such a yearning would be founded on false precepts because all life is quite as authentic, and the hallowed is a notion belonging to life, not life itself. Yearning toward reality, yearning toward authenticity expresses nothing other than the yearning for meaning, and meaning arises out of cohesion, in the way we are connected to one another and our surroundings.
Art is unique and local, striving always toward the unique and local, resisting everything that seeks to pull it from that trajectory. Its entire value resides in this.
The new has to be required or desired, it must afford clear-cut advantages, and when the impulse toward the new arises, communities must be found in which it may be developed and maintained.
Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world; beauty is the other. They are forces seldom talked about, since both issue from the individual, neither may be learned or acquired, and in a democracy, where everyone is meant to be considered equal and where all relationships are meant to be just, such properties cannot be accorded value, though all of us are aware of them and of how much they mean.
the morality of an utterance is not absolute, but is determined also by its style and its signature, and may change as its framework of interpretation, which is to say culture, changes.
Morality does not exist outside society, outside its institutions, in the form of something absolute that we humans may invoke at any time, no, it is a part of us at this very moment and moreover was different in the time of our parents, as it will be different in the time of our children, though perhaps not by much, for the most desirable thing for a society is for its moral structures to remain the same and to appear for as long as possible to be absolute and extrasocietal.
Morality is the we within the I, which is to say a concept of the social world, and it stands above the truth. The “ought” of morality is the voice of decency that saves us. But it is also the voice of I-constraint, the antithesis of truth and freedom, the voice that stands in our way.
Latour writes, there is no such thing as science, only scientists, fragile and small in themselves, shuffling about in laboratories in their slippers, with their freezers and microscopes, their test tubes and computers, drinking coffee with their colleagues, going home after work and wondering whether to barbecue or if the clouds above the hills mean it’s going to rain. That this is so means “science” is something that cannot be localized without violating that singularity, but which at the same time obviously exists, as the sum of activities performed by scientists.
So I had to go down beneath the surface, beneath the ideologies, which you can only stand up to by insisting on your own experience of reality, and not by denying it, for that is what we do, all the time, deny the reality we have experienced in favor of the reality we have learned,
I woke up in a bad mood. I always did, but as long as I had the critical first half an hour in peace, got a cup of coffee down me, and smoked a cigarette, it passed of its own accord.
gardening is the very symbol of bourgeois stasis, utterly ridiculous and superficial, an artificial way of ordering the world’s chaos by limiting the world to a lawn and a few bushes and subjugating them completely.
This is what it is like being twenty, everything is open, but as that which isn’t open still hasn’t revealed itself, you don’t know about it, what it entails, until it is too late, and then the next generation has the world at their feet while you putter around in a suburban garden with children and a car and perhaps soon even a dog,
the terrible banality and vigor of youth,
When she came back that afternoon and we cooked and ate as usual it felt as if we had lived through a year in the past two days. I was utterly exhausted, she was too, but at the same time something trembled inside me, and I knew that feeling, it was happiness. Whenever I felt myself tremble like this I tried to repress it, for if there is one thing I had learned in the forty years I’d been alive it was that it was so much easier to carry despair than hope.
I wished I could have made myself not care, say to hell with the idiots who sat scrutinizing other people’s gardens, this feeble-minded bunch of wrinkled old folk with sagging skin who were unable to think about anything except what was right and fair and spent their remaining years and days, replete with all the experience a long and unique life had given them, keeping a lawn manicured and foaming with indignation when others did not. I wished I didn’t care about them, but I did. The truth was that I feared them and really wanted to make peace with them.
I thought he had never had a chance. Something had been broken inside him at a very young age. This is a dangerous notion because no one apart from ourselves has responsibility for what we do, we are humans, not creatures subject to forces that drive us here and there without offering any resistance. Unless of course being under the sway of others is part of the human condition, and being a good person is the same as being a lucky person.
you are your own person and you have your own time, which is now, so why on earth do you let the past have any influence on it?
