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— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 1986.

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“We would gain more by showing ourselves as we are than by trying to appear to be what we are not.”

— François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections

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You almost never need permission. Official authorisation, sometimes. But never permission. And there’s a critical distinction between the two, and from which the road to meaningful self-agency emerges.

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You are the living substrate in and through which all of your ancestors, your past selves, your loved ones gone, your beloved fictional characters, and all other immaterial phenomena (not made any less important by virtue of their non-physicality) may find an earthly form (once removed) in this present moment. You are the ground substance through which they live again.

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“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”

― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is — the afflictions of Job.”

— Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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Culturally, much of the language of personal development is anchored to activity, action, involvement, investment, labour, analysis, deconstruction, interpretation, critique, attention, mindfulness, and so on. But, there are sudden and unexpected shortcuts to the higher self — shortcuts whose descriptors have more do with passivity and detachment than with active involvement in one’s own pathology and healing. It is amazing how much progress can be made out of sheer fatigue of a wound with which one has become too familiar. To tread and tread and retread the same grounds of misery until there nothing can grow any longer — and to decide thereafter, “Well, that’s it. On to better pastures!”

Some wounds don’t heal, but rather simply become obsolete.

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This. This is precisely what I wish to avoid. Life lived at a distance. Beauty apprehended by mind only, never by flesh, by body, by touch, by soul. To reach the end of my days having amassed worldly knowledge unaccompanied by any trace of a sensuous contact with the world, with the real world, with the ten thousand things of the real world.

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Renzo Novatore, from The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore; translated by Wolfi Landstreicher

Text ID: You still want to go on living on your knees. But I have understood life. / And anyone who understands life cannot live on his knees.

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“I’m just, you know, kind of happy in the doing of things. Even just having a great cup of coffee is happiness. Getting an idea, or realizing an idea. Working on a painting…working on a piece of sculpture, working on a film. One thing I noticed is that many of us, we do what we call work for a goal. For a result. And in the doing, it’s not that much happiness. And yet that’s our life going by. If you’re transcending every day, building up that happiness, it eventually comes to: it doesn’t matter what your work is. You just get happy in the work. You get happy in the little things and the big things. And if the result isn’t what you dreamed of, it doesn’t kill you, if you enjoyed the doing of it. It’s important that we enjoy the doing of our life.”

— David Lynch

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“Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.”

— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

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“The room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere. As in dreams, the “logic” was something else, was one that makes no sense when you awaken, since the dream’s greater truth is lost.”

— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.

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Milena Jesenská’s obituary for Franz Kafka

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“Why wouldn’t you rehearse for a good future? I think that we should celebrate and rehearse for a bright future, and maybe it will come true. I don’t have time to illustrate misery or dystopian scenarios because they’ll happen. If you let everything go, they’ll happen anyway.” —Syd Mead

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“The awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and the soul is only a word for something about the body.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

Is grappling with Nietzsche still a rite of passage for angst-ridden college freshman? It’s funny that in all the time I spent wrestling with Nietzsche back then, I never once saw that his work was deeply informed by the biologists, physiologist, and other natural scientists of his time. His assertion that soul was only a word for the body was a direct repudiation of Western philosophy’s reduction of the self as a kind of Cartesian thinking thing that could be investigated independently of the biological processes that sustained it. Nietzsche opened the door to a philosophy grounded in life, biology, and instinct, rather than abstract rationality or otherworldly ideals.

“Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from, the forever-incalculable prompting of the creative well-head within him. There is no universal law. Each being is, at his purest, a law unto himself, single, unique, a Godhead, a fountain from the unknown.”

— Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible.

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Clarity after action. Almost always.

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“Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.”

— Byung-chul Han, The Burnout Society