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“If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure, that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.”

- Life Without Principle by Henry David Thoreau

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I enjoyed this clip in particular.

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sequence of documentaries I enjoy

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“I mean, that's what we're trying to attain, aren't we, through media? - That awful max-imisation of time and efficient transmission of 'information'. Some of this is economic - time equals money - and some is simply done because it can be done, and has become an unquestioned convention.”

Interview with John Foxx

Ghosts of My Life - Mark Fisher

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Ghosts of My Life - Mark Fisher

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Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.

Ghosts of My Life - Mark Fisher

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“Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other.... There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than something else, nor any idea better than another... All gain is a loss, and all loss is a gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.”

- Emil Cioran On The Heights Of Despair

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“But how can those who violently experience hatred, despair, chaos, nothingness, or love, who burn with each passion and gradually die with each in each, those who can only breathe on the heights, who are always alone, especially when they are with others—how can they grow in linear fashion and crystallize into a system? All that is form, system, category, frame, or plan tends to make things absolute and springs from a lack of inner energy, from a sterile spiritual life. Life’s great tensions verge on chaos and the madness of exaltation. Rich spiritual life must know chaos and the effervescent paroxysm of illness, because in them inspiration appears to be essential for creation and contradictions become expressions of high inner temperatures. Nobody who does not love chaos is a creator, and whoever is contemptuous of illness must not speak of the spirit. There is value only in that which bursts forth from inspiration, which springs up from the irrational depths of our being, from the secret center of our subjectivity.”

— Emil Cioran, “The Contradictory and the Inconsequential,” On the Heights of Despair

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You know the anguish of not having done and the anxiety of doing things in their proper time, while what you do not know approaches and presses you from all sides. You feel behind time, dissolving like a corpse preserved in an airless environment, which no sooner than exposed turns to dust. You feel long dead and yet live and fear death. In the face of slowly advancing, inexorable time, you feel as powerless to care for your life as a dead man, and you suffer each moment the pain of death.

Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion & Rhetoric

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Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence

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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born

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Here again at the end

Before the beginning

So the salt will spill again

Throw it over your shoulder

Oh it's in tomorrow, fortune or sorrow

Wait, you may win

I don't mean to show that I know how this goes

Before we begin

Again

You may hide on one side

And me on the other

You may speak, but wait for me

Should my sentence faulter

Oh it's in tomorrow, fortune or sorrow

Wait, you may win

But now it feels empty, there's no need in guessing

Before we begin

Again

Oh it's in tomorrow, fortune or sorrow

Wait, you may win

But now it feels empty, there's no need in guessing

Before we begin

Again

So here we are

Again

Back to the beginning

So the salt will spill again

Throw it over your shoulder

Oh it's in tomorrow, fortune or sorrow

Wait, you may win

I don't mean to show that I know how this goes

Before we begin

Again

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According To No Plan - Broadcast

Oh, and I found myself lost

Looked but nowhere to belong

The status I achieve

holds nothing I believe

And we drift unmanned

According to no plan

And I don't know where we are

Can't say what we're affected by

Something has us beat

Leaves us open to defeat

And we drift unmanned

According to no plan

The status I achieve

Holds nothing I believe

And we drift unmanned

According to no plan

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If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains?—and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no “ecstasy” which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!

Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born

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Prosperous societies are far more fragile than the others, since it remains for them to achieve only their own ruin, comfort not being an ideal when we possess it, still less of one when it has been around for generations. Not to mention the fact that nature has not included well-being in her calculations and could not do so without perishing herself.

Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born