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The Atelier

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If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.

— Nick Cave on getting clean, Red Hand Files #258

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Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil

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The only thing that matters today is the activity of those who can ride the wave and remain firm in their principles, unmoved by any concessions and indifferent to the fevers, the convulsions, the superstitions, and the prostitutions that characterize modern generations. The only thing that matters is the silent endurance of a few, whose impassible presence as stone guests helps to create new relationships, new distances, new values, and helps to construct a pole that, although it will certainly not prevent this world inhabited by the distracted and restless from being what it is, will still help to transmit to someone the sensation of the truth. A sensation that could become for them the principle of a liberating crisis.

Revolt Against the Modern World

Julius Evola

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Freud said that we endlessly repeat past hurts, forever re-enacting the same patterns in a futile attempt to patch the un-healable wound. This, more than anything, is the terror of the personal, digital archive: not that it reveals some awful act from the past, some old self that no longer stands for us, but that it reminds us that who we are is in fact a repetition, a cycle, a circular relation of multiple selves to multiple injuries. It’s the self as a bundle of trauma, forever acting out the same tropes in the hopes that we might one day change.

Navneet Alang, "Terror of the Archive"

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“L’io in realtà non vuole mai una cosa perché la considera giusta o razionale, ma la trova razionale o giusta semplicemente perché la vuole.”

— Julius Evola

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“Education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world.”

— Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit

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“The beginning and the end are common on the circumference of a circle.”

— Heraclitus, Fragments, B103

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“But I love such days—rare lonely days. I love above all things, my dear, to be alone.”

— Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to J.M. Murry, from The Letters of Katherine Mansfield

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“Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby these actions are determined.”

— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

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“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

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Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (detail)

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Carl Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1938–1940

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Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

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The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also by chance. They will die. What they think, do and say is limited and is a mixture of good and evil. I have to know this with all my soul and not love them the less. I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.

Simone Weil, "Chance" in Gravity and Grace