tonreihe's blog

“Consequently, without knowing it, [Thérèse of Lisieux] conceives a new idea of the next world. Christians had imagined it primarily in terms of ‘happiness’—and, what is more, an individual, personal happiness that is the final state toward which human beings, of their very nature, must inevitably strive. And this final state was regarded as synonymous with the cessation of all movement, as ‘resting in God’ after the ‘restlessness of this world’. This classical conception of the next world, shaped by Augustine and Thomas, was originally derived from the Platonic philosophy of Eros and the Aristotelian view of finality. Thérèse knows no philosophy. Even her simplest Christian notions remain uninfluenced and uncorrupted by current generalizations or clichés. She heeds only the laws of heavenly love within her; by them she is guided to her conclusions about the nature of heaven. The notion of earthly laborers being rewarded does not come within her reckoning: ‘The crown she is to receive did not interest her at all. She said to me that it was a matter she left to the good God.’ She was no more interested in getting to heaven as soon as possible: ‘I would not have picked up a single straw in order to avoid the fires of Purgatory. Everything I have done I have done in order to give joy to the good God and to save souls for him.’ And, responding to the remark that she should rejoice to be released soon from the troubles of this life: ‘I who am such a brave soldier!’ It is not ‘happiness’ that draws her toward heaven. Although she will accept all the joy God may send her with overflowing, childish gratitude, she herself longs, not for ‘happiness’, but only for love. ‘Eternal love’, not ‘eternal happiness’, is the center of her being in God, and the laws of love are infinitely richer and deeper than the laws of happiness, to say nothing of the laws of repose.”

“Your robot body also hosts a BIOS mind, which is only conscious at startup and during hardware emergencies. You don't even know her name”

“You are trapped in a body, but you are also trapped in a mind—one whose smallness may prove just as painful as the physical dysmorphia”

“You can measure someone's vanity based on where they think our world-simulation is running: on top secret supercomputers, on a child's cellphone, on some god's pacemaker, on an abacus, on a four-dimensional sexbot”

“She returned from the woods with glowing eyes, a voice like static or birdsong, pine needles and pixels tangled in her hair”

“The sinister Backrooms, a mysterious dimension that users risk getting sucked into at their own peril, burst onto the collective imagination in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and represent a continuation of the cultural strand that came into being in the previous decade with viral stories like the Slender Man. But the narrative around the Backrooms phenomenon presents a number of distinctive features. The idea of an infinite labyrinth of identical rooms, a place whose origin and exact location are unknown, is indeed a powerful symbolic image capable of evoking atavistic fears and contemporary nightmares, a potent cocktail of esotericism, horror, quantum physics, philosophy, and gaming. While most creepypasta stories are far-fetched but theoretically possible, and set in the world we know, albeit a world haunted by serial killers, monstrous creatures, and cursed objects, the Backrooms push harder at the envelope of reality. It is not a real or even realistic place; its existence is entirely hypothetical, and the original myth has no narrative elements or characters. It is a purely speculative entity. The best description of it was coined by the anonymous author of the podcast The Backrooms 101, who, in the introductory episode, called the Backrooms ‘a theoretical liminal hellscape.’”

“For all the darkness to be found in von Balthasar’s Apokalypse, a world in which the human being lives in the shadow of total death without the Christian God, beauty has not died. Well into his theological career, von Balthasar begins a massive theological project: the trilogy (his “Triptych”), of which the first word is beauty. If Apokalypse and Glory of the Lord are to be viewed together, then the first word of the latter is a response to the first word of the former: beauty responds to terror.”