pretty thoughts, pretty pretty

“An die Zukunft zu denken erschien mir unklug.”

“…perhaps it would be wisest just to take the whole thing and forget it, take it and not force the issue anymore; but we don’t forget because it is impossible to forget, and we force it, for this screaming does not cease of its own accord, no matter what we do…”

"La culture consumériste est l’institution centrale de la rêverie dans le monde contemporain, et elle façonne la nouvelle structure psychique du moi, marquée par l’espoir." [...]

“SCHLIESS DIE TÜR UND BEGREIFE, daß niemandem etwas fehlt, wenn du fehlst, begreife, daß du der einzige bist der ohne Pause über dich nachdenkt, daß du die Tür schließen kannst ohne viel Aufhebens und ohne Angst, es könnte dich einer beobachten. Dich beobachtet keiner. Du fehlst keinem. Wenn du das begriffen hast, kannst du die Tür schließen hinter dir.”

“It is not merely that people must die and people must suffer, if not here, then there. But what is dreadful is that the world goes on and people go on being stupidly cruel - in the old ways and all the time.”

“Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”

“For various reasons, many forms of introspection lost all of their beauty when the therapeutic industry capitalized on them. The therapeutic narrative makes us believe that there is something inside us we can discover, a secret kernel, a source code of the ego, a shining or shocking truth. A nonsocial real self that we can live up to in order to feel again, live again. But the more we dive into our selves and the more obsessed we get in finding something alive inside, the harder we try to finally feel something instead of infinite boredom, the less we are able to feel. Richard Sennett tells you so, Eva Illouz tells you so, Haruki Murakami tells you so, in an interesting metaphor, in the Wind Up Bird Chronicles: What can we expect after having unraveled all the layers of our social identity, but a void, an empty dark well without water?”

“Wenn, wie Freud dachte, der Mensch neurotisch wird, weil er das Ausmaß des Verzichts, das die Gesellschaft fordert, nicht ertragen kann, so wird er depressiv, weil er die Illusion ertragen muss, dass ihm alles möglich ist.”

“Scherz ist die drittbeste Tarnung. Die zweitbeste: Sentimentalität. […] Aber die beste und sicherste Tarnung ist noch immer die blanke und nackte Wahrheit. Komischerweise. Die glaubt niemand.”