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The only noble desire is for the end of desire. Few are brave enough to admit this.
He looked to the years behind and saw a featureless, beige corridor. He looked to the future and saw an identical corridor stretching ahead.
Hearing and not listening; forever the perpetual, stinging, unnamed sense at the back of his mind that he lived inside a brain too small to understand or even witness the true beauty of the world, and so the only option left was to languish in the self-imposed illusion that objects and errands and little fears and little hopes were the full extent of being alive, else go mad.
Urinating one morning he became transfixed with an intricate pattern on the plaster of the toilet and mangled the tip of his penis in his trouser zip. Such is the path to enlightenment.
Anaximander said, If I told you of a man who hunts through the refuse and rubbish every day selecting only matter he can eat, or breaks into homes raiding pantries, you would be no closer to understanding his motives until I mentioned the meaning of his quest. He is hungry. All the descriptions of his eye colour and his height do nothing to explain that. The wisewoman said, The universe is not a man. No, Anaximander said. I believe its wants are stranger yet.
“The difference between a hero and a fool is nothing more than the bias of the biographer.
Mind is only matter that knows it is matter. Matter is only mind that is yet to become mind.
they had both forgotten that life mostly consists of well-meant decisions with hideous consequences.
He was mud. He was a mud thing; not apart from the world but of it, a tiny footnote in the great book of existence. He longed desperately to open that book and scour it from start to finish, and come away with the purpose of creation.
The true horror of existence is not the certainty of death, nor the threat of hell, but the knowledge that we will likely go our entire lives as impossibly complex machines, walking about in an impossibly complex universe, and never truly discover what it was all for. I don’t know is brave. I’ll never know is heroic.
Soon everything was lonely and against her and she began to cry.
There is nothing obvious about the picture of the world we have obtained using the scientific method. Molecules, quarks, atoms, billions of stars and galaxies, meat that knows it’s sentient—what is this madness? And, of course, one might ask: is the scientific model of reality not just another kind of magic, another absurd, fanciful delusion? The answer is: yes. However, it also happens to be the only delusion that doesn’t go away when one stops believing in it.
“My foreign friend! Would you care for a narcotic breakfast?”
It seemed to him suddenly that self-hate was the result of a misguided attempt to please people one would never meet, and if one did meet such judgemental idiots, one would not respect them nor desire their respect in the first place.
“Shyness is just narcissism for introverts. You’d do well to remember that.”
He seems like he knows what he’s doing. “You said he was unwell!” Leo whispered. A little quirky maybe.
“You knew my mother,” Leo said finally. “Sure. In a romantic capacity for a short time even, but let’s not talk about that. Or we can talk about that.” “I don’t want to talk about that.”
I am alone, he thought. There is no one left in all of time and space who will love me without conditions. I must go into every battle as an army of one, if I choose to still fight.
I was ugly before, but loved. Now I’m just ugly.
There is nothing worse than to remain sober around those who are drinking. Their euphoria intensifies, while you only grow quietly embarrassed for them. At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving them of the bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching. The reaction is much the same from the gluttonous, rich, and powerful when one reminds them that the resources of the environment are not infinite. They might continue to plunder, but they will hate you for bringing conscience into their
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“Excuse me, your holiness, but have you finally had your big mid-thirties stroke?”
That’s where we’ll live: between the beginning and end of everything, in the Sunshine Middle of the World.
Many will claim they are wise. Do not believe them; the wise are quiet. Many will claim they know nothing. Do not believe them; how could they know that? If you must seek the advice of anyone, make it the drunk. He knows the game means nothing and wins it by not playing.
When we’ve sucked our galaxy dry and even our bones are gone, will something be nostalgic for us? Will anything remember?
In some universe next door where everything is the same but for minor discrepancies, I did not become your father. Some almost-identical version of myself is sat at some almost-identical desk right now with a great hole in his heart he never found the occasion to fill, because he never found anything to be proud of, or to love. But I have been lucky enough to live in this universe where this man has something to be proud of, and to love, and she is the brightest and kindest daughter any father was ever blessed to have.
Be kind, and when you can’t be kind, be fair. And when you can’t be fair, be clever. And when you can’t be clever, please be kind again.
choose not to harm because I know what it is to be harmed, and I’d rather not inflict it on my kin or friends or society. I don’t have to be commanded to do so. I choose to. If I behaved well just because I’d been told to, with the threat of hell or what have you, that isn’t really good behaviour at all, but a celestial hostage situation.”
smile kindly, though could not quarantine her anger from it. “Yet we Gearheartians do have a transcendent narrative, sir. The night sky. The hundred billion galaxies and hundred trillion stars within them. I’m sorry if those stars and galaxies don’t personally care about you, that’s unfortunate. But do we have to cheapen the majesty of nature by trying to see divine purpose in it? The universe has so far proven to be apathetic about our respective existences. That isn’t warming news, but it is the news, and as adults we’re supposed to be honest with ourselves regarding such a thing.
I’m sorry if ignorance scares you. I’m sorry if you can’t stand the thought of dying before you’ve found the meta-yes. But that’s how this works, for now. And in the meantime, bookended by birth and death, riding about in bodies of carbon, loving, suffering, striving, for a short, short time, we get to be. If we’re forced to be in a mysterious universe, and that universe is mute on the subject of its own motivations for existing, I’ll still take living in honest ignorance over your metaphysical posturing any day.
That’s real bravery. Not concocting blatantly contradictory stories to comfort oneself, not appealing to the vague transcendent every time you get your worldview in a twist. Ignorance. Brave, honest admission of one’s ignorance, and living with that ignorance in a kind, compassionate manner, treating each other well even if we know we eventually all go to dust and never happen again. We must try to be wise, to be good women, to be good men. The rite of adulthood is the admission of ignorance, not the proliferation of fabricated stories to assuage our existential fears.
The mark of a society’s stupidity is the degree to which it believes its own myths.
You are sentient meat standing on an organic spaceship; this is all perfectly normal.
“So too I realised what had so bored me about religion. It claimed to be in the employ of truth, yet every time it was confronted with a truth it couldn’t swallow, it only stuck its fingers in its ears and sang until the problem vanished. For all its grandiosity, it seemed to consist of exactly the kinds of stories humans would tell themselves for comfort. It was all wonder without fact.
“We would find wonder in the imponderable majesty of the little, in all of the cells and molecules and atoms and quarks inside one’s body, the beauty of it, the absurdity.
