Puddles

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.

‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.

Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.

The Geschick of being: a child that plays […] Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The “because? withers away in the play. The play is without “why.” It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this “simply” is everything, the one, the only […] The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

I’m something that I used to be. I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions. ------- story of my life -------

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.