Kin

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
― Marcel Proust

“Ultimately, it is difficult to divorce the positive evaluation of suffering from the claim that suffering means something, in accordance with the strictures which the manifest image imposes upon our understanding of meaning. But to invest suffering with the varieties of ‘meaning’ concomitant with the manifest image is to automatically reinscribe woe into a spiritual calculus which subordinates present suffering to some recollected or longed-for happiness. By way of contrast, to acknowledge the meaninglessness of suffering is already to challenge the authority of the manifest image, since it is precisely its senselessness that renders woe resistant to redemptive valuation. Once the senselessness of suffering has been acknowledged, it becomes more apposite to insist that ‘woe is deeper than heart’s ecstasy’. This of course would be contrary to the explicitly stated goal of Nietzsche’s transvaluation, viz., that suffering no longer be counted as an objection to life. Nevertheless, unlike its affirmative antithesis, to which, as we shall see below, Nietzsche attributes a redemptive function vis-à-vis suffering, it is precisely the refusal to affirm or redeem woe that challenges the authority of the manifest image.”
― Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“In that summer of broken hearts and vented spleens, this old couple began their journey towards what should perhaps be our common destination: holding the balance between our love and anger. For when life overtakes love, isn't anger inevitable? It is easy to feel betrayed and even easier to upset the balance beyond repair.”
― Merlinda Bobis, Banana Heart Summer