an artificial night

I felt clumsy so I tried to make it funny. But I have never been able to resign myself to succeeding only as a clown.

In moments of temptation or indecision - for example, when the man who has resolved not to gamble anymore is confronted with the gaming tables once again - one realises, painfully, that no motive and no past resolution, however strong, determines what one will do next.

I have wrapped myself round in my own personality again. How does it come about - these sudden,intense changes of view? Perhaps my life is unusually conscious: very vivid to me. But when I enter a complete world of its own, I realise that this is existing whether I exist or not; and so get bowled over.

It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

We look at each other; see that we do not know each other, stare, and go off. Such looks are lashes. I feel the whole cruelty and indifference of the world in them.

So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.

Harumph! What is life but an inconvenient interruption of pleasant non-existence?

On Sundays Kafka goes for walks by himself, without any objective, without thinking. He says, ‘Every day I wish myself off the earth. There is nothing wrong with me except myself.’

The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

For life itself is no solution, life has no kind of existence which is chosen, consented to, and self-determined. It is a mere series of hungers and adverse forces, of petty contradictions which succeed or miscarry according to the circumstances of an odious gamble.

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man’s brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn’t understand you at all.

“The tiny little place I occupy is so small in relation to the rest of space where I am not and where it’s none of my business; and the amount of time which I’ll succeed in living is so insignificant by comparison with the eternity where I haven’t been and never will be…And yet in this atom, in this mathematical point, the blood circulates, the brain works and even desires something as well…What sheer ugliness! What sheer nonsense!”

The information is nothing. Nothing: the answer to so many of our questions. What will happen to me when I die? What is death anyway? Is there anything I can do about that? Of what does the universe primarily consist? What is the measure of our influence within it? What is our span, in cosmic time? What will our world eventually become? What mark will we leave—to remember us by?