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The mysteries of time were banal, he told himself, this was the way of the world: youthful optimism fades, and happiness and confidence evaporate.
He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.
Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved.
The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.
A life lived in pursuit of a goal leaves little time for reminiscence.
Later, the rise of the global economy would create much fiercer competition, which swept away all the dreams of integrating the populace into a vast middle class with ever-rising incomes. Whole social classes fell through the net and joined the ranks of the unemployed.
But the past always seems, perhaps wrongly, to be predestined.
In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. Such is life.
Water follows the path of least resistance. Human behavior is predetermined in principle in almost all of its actions and offers few choices, of which fewer still are taken.
women who turned twenty in the late sixties found themselves in a difficult position when they hit forty. Most of them were divorced and could no longer count on the conjugal bond—whether warm or abject—whose decline they had served to hasten. As members of a generation who—more than any before—had proclaimed the superiority of youth over age, they could hardly claim to be surprised when they, in turn, were despised by succeeding generations.
As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.
As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.
Death is the great leveler.
Men who grow old alone have it easier than older women. They drink cheap booze and fall asleep, their breath stinks, then they wake up and start all over again; they tend to die young. Women take tranquilizers, go to yoga classes, see a shrink; they live a lot longer and suffer a lot more. They try to trade on their looks, even when they know their bodies are sad and ugly. They get hurt but they do it anyway, because they can’t give up the need to be loved. That’s one delusion they’ll keep to the bitter end. Once she’s past a certain age, a woman might get to rub up against some cocks, but she
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“Never could stand feminists . . .” Christiane continued when they were halfway up the hill. “Stupid bitches always going on about washing dishes and the division of labor; they could never shut up about the dishes. Oh, sometimes they’d talk about cooking or vacuuming, but their favorite topic was washing dishes. In a few short years, they managed to turn every man they knew into an impotent, whining neurotic. Once they’d done that, it was always the same story—they started going on about how there were no real men anymore. They usually ended up ditching their boyfriends for a quick fuck with
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Mantras and tarot may be stupid, but they’re a lot cheaper than therapy.”
When it is necessary to modify or renew fundamental doctrine, the generations sacrificed to the era during which the transformation takes place remain essentially alienated from that transformation, and often become directly hostile to it. AUGUSTE COMTE, —Un Appel aux conservateurs
The utopian solution—from Plato to Huxley by way of Fourier—is to do away with desire and the suffering it causes by satisfying it immediately. The opposite is true of the sex-and-advertising society we live in, where desire is marshaled and blown up out of all proportion, while satisfaction is maintained in the private sphere. For society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more, until desire fills their lives and finally devours them.”
Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe.
What’s a banker or a senator or a CEO next to an actor or a rock star? Financially, sexually, any way you look at it, they’re nonentities. The strategies of distinction so subtly described by Proust are completely meaningless nowadays.
Unlike Hitler, unlike Stalin, the only thing Napoleon believed in was himself.
In a sense, the serial killers of the 1990s were the spiritual children of the hippies of the sixties, and their common ancestors would be the Viennese Actionists of the fifties.
Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who affirmed the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippie movement, but its logical conclusion;
For many women, adolescence is exciting—they’re really interested in boys and sex. But gradually they lose interest; they’re not so keen to open their legs or to get on their knees and wiggle their ass. They’re looking for a tender relationship they never will find, for a passion they’re no longer capable of feeling. Thus they begin the difficult years.
Unhappiness isn’t at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned.
Children suffer the world that adults create for them and try their best to adapt to it; in time, usually, they will replicate it.
It is possible to know someone for years, decades even, learning little by little how to avoid personal questions and anything of real importance, but the hope remains that someday, in different circumstances, one could talk about such things, ask such questions. Though it may be indefinitely postponed, the idea of a more personal, human relationship never fades, quite simply because human relationships do not fit easily into narrow, fixed compartments.
There is no power in the world—economic, political, religious or social—that can compete with rational certainty.
The world is equal to the sum of the information we have about it.”
“It’s a curious idea to reproduce when you don’t even like life.”
You make a baby, or you don’t; it’s not a decision one can make rationally.
Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason.
In this apartment, as in his whole life now, he knew he would always feel as though he were staying in a hotel.
Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds, while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.
Though it may be difficult for us to understand this now, it is important to remember how central the notions of “personal freedom,” “human dignity” and “progress” were to people in the age of materialism (defined as the centuries between the decline of medieval Christianity and the publication of Djerzinski’s work). The confused and arbitrary nature of these ideas meant, of course, that they had little practical or social function—which might explain why human history from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was characterized by progressive decline and disintegration. Nonetheless, the
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“That which is there to be spoken and thought of must be.”
