LIBRARIES BURN

“Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does — or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes?”

"Wash the plate not because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next."

“It’s summer now, and you’re craving a simpler existence. You want to read. You want to write. You want to meet strangers for dinner, and not refuse another drink at another bar. You want to dance. You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must. It’s summer now, and you’re looking forward to worrying less. You’re looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You’re looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You’re looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You’re looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You’re looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You’re looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You’re looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last. You’re looking forward.”

All of us should strive — as Sartre advises — to engage with the books of our own time. At the very least, albeit sometimes wearyingly so, they remind us of how much in our world needs fixing. After all, it’s hard to fault Marx’s activist observation that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Yet the books of the past, besides adding to our understanding, offer something we also need: repose, refreshment and renewal. They help us keep going through dark times, they lift our spirits, they comfort us. Which means that I also strongly agree with the poet John Ashbery, who once wrote, “I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.”

And I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.

In the course of the eighteenth century, alchemy perished in its own obscurity. Its method of explanation “obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius” (the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown) was incompatible with the spirit of enlightenment and particularly with the dawning science of chemistry towards the end of the century. But these two new intellectual forces only gave the coup de grace to alchemy. Its inner decay had begun at least a century earlier, at the time of Jakob Böhme, when many alchemists deserted their alembics and melting-pots and devoted themselves entirely to (Hermetic) philosophy. It was then that the chemist and the Hermetic philosopher parted company. Chemistry became natural science, whereas Hermetic philosophy lost the empirical ground from under its feet and aspired to bombastic allegories and inane speculations which were kept alive only by memories of a better time. This was a time when the mind of the alchemist was still grappling with the problems of matter, when the exploring consciousness was confronted by the dark void of the unknown, in which figures and laws were dimly perceived and attributed to matter although they really belonged to the psyche. Everything unknown and empty is filled with psychological projection; it is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter, or thinks he can see, is chiefly the data of his own unconscious which he is projecting into it. In other words, he encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious.

There are several images that come to mind when I think of women brushing their hair. Most of the time it is a solitary woman in front of her mirror — where a woman regards herself in a private moment. The French Impressionist Edgar Degas was fascinated with this kind of scene. Women in the midst of preparing themselves feature heavily in Degas’s work, second to his ballerinas. Often called a variation of “Femme a sa Toilette,” these women brush their hair, lean over a wash basin, and dry themselves off. Though the subjects are nude, the paintings do not give a sexual air. They capture the gentle intimacy of tending to yourself, when the door is closed. Degas wrote of these works, “It is the human animal preoccupied with itself, like a cat licking itself […] My women are simple creatures and honest too, and are concerned with nothing except their physical occupation.” To those who have never tried their hand at femininity, it may seem defined by its final product. That women often sit at a table called a “vanity” speaks to how pejoratively we regard the process. Though society prefers us to forget, an integral part of femininity is the ritual of its making. As Diana Vreeland writes, “The girls keep looking in the mirror…which is all right by me. I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.”

I was never a well-behaved girl. After all, I never had a vocation for shy joy, for passion without hot kisses or for badly resolved love without hiccups. I want from life what is raw and beautiful. I'm not here for people to like me. I'm here to learn to like every detail I have. And to seduce only what adds me. I am dramatic, intense, transient and have a joy in me that sometimes tires me. So don't give me more or less or anything. Come to me with body, soul, greed and shortness of breath.

I also felt that she was holding herself together with a safety pin, was forcing herself to be clear, articulate, active—to keep moving, one step ahead of the sledgehammer of grief.

In a world made hyperreal, saturated with versions of itself, saturated with meaning, nihilism’s simplicity and emptiness return from forgotten thinkers like some ancient remedy long mistaken for a symptom: an earlier curative to a later malaise, a medicament in search of a condition that has laid patiently in wait only to arrive now, most likely too late. For what amounts to an atavistic chemotherapy for hypermodernity’s new cancer comes at a time when sickness is no longer permitted; and while nihilism is . . . a sickness that cures, it comes with no anti-emetic, so that the only way out of nihilism is to go further inside it.