The true self [is] an immaterial pinprick of intensified consciousness, a point not in space and existing apart, separated from both material things and "other minds." Hence, we are alone, and yet our isolation continually strives to reach the consciousness of the other. And so we discover, those of us who are sufficiently interested in searching into our own introspective states of consciousness, that we exist alone through time. We can never know another human being and seldom, if ever, even know ourselves. When we do grasp the self, it is through the agency of a rather momentary feeling, a memory of the past that suddenly swallows our present consciousness.
The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts. That is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception.
Everything we do is for our first loves
whom we have lost irrevocably
who have married insurance salesmen
and moved to Topeka
and never think of us at all.
We fly planes & design buildings
and write poems
that all say Sally I love you
I’ll never love anyone else
Why didn’t you know I was going to be a poet?
The walks to school, the kisses in the snow
gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age:
our legs are young again, our voices
strong and happy, we’re not afraid.
We don’t know enough to be afraid.
And now
we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope
that some day
she may fly in our plane
enter our building, read our poem
And that night, deep in her dream,
Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka,
with the salesman lying beside her,
will cry out
our unfamiliar name.
whom we have lost irrevocably
who have married insurance salesmen
and moved to Topeka
and never think of us at all.
We fly planes & design buildings
and write poems
that all say Sally I love you
I’ll never love anyone else
Why didn’t you know I was going to be a poet?
The walks to school, the kisses in the snow
gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age:
our legs are young again, our voices
strong and happy, we’re not afraid.
We don’t know enough to be afraid.
And now
we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope
that some day
she may fly in our plane
enter our building, read our poem
And that night, deep in her dream,
Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka,
with the salesman lying beside her,
will cry out
our unfamiliar name.
I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being...not seeming, but being. Conscious at every moment. Vigilant. At the same time, the chasm between what you are to others and to yourself. The feeling of vertigo and the constant desire to, at last, be exposed...to be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated. Every tone of voice is a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? No, that’s vulgar. You don’t do that. But you can be immobile. You can fall silent. Then, at least, you don’t lie. You can close yourself in, shut yourself off. Then you don’t have to play roles, show any faces, or make false gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is bloody-minded. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life seeps in everything. You’re forced to react. No one asks if it’s real or unreal, if you’re true or false. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand your keeping silent, your immobility. That you’ve placed this lack of will into a fantastic system. I understand. I admire you. You should go on with this until it’s played out, until it’s no longer interesting. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.
Eating and drinking don’t make friendships – such friendship even robbers and murderers have.
That faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this.
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn't tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.
The common prejudice that love is as common as ‘romance’ may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which ennoscripts them to mistake it for a universal one.
I see nothing but a world of ruins, where a kind of front line is possible in the catacombs
“I hear you.” Not “You’re right.” I don’t even need to agree. Just acknowledge. I hear you. I hear your frustration. I get it.
We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.