The Joyous Defunct — Charles Bauldelaire

Where snails abound—in a juicy soil,

I will dig for myself a fathomless grave,

Where at leisure mine ancient bones I can coil,

And sleep—quite forgotten—like a shark 'neath the wave.

I hate every tomb—I abominate wills,

And rather than tears from the world to implore,

I would ask of the crows with their vampire bills

To devour every bit of my carcass impure.

Oh worms, without eyes, without ears, black friends!

To you a defunct-one, rejoicing, descends,

Enlivened Philosophers—offspring of Dung!

Without any qualms, o'er my wreckage spread,

And tell if some torment there still can be wrung

For this soul-less old frame that is dead 'midst the dead! 

People will notice higher tides that roll in more and more frequently. Water will pool longer in streets and parking lots. Trees will turn brown and die as they suck up salt water.” We will retreat to higher ground, cover our roofs with solar panels, finally stop using plastic, and go vegan, but it will be too late. As he writes, “even in rich neighborhoods, abandoned houses will linger like ghosts, filling with feral cats and other refugees looking for their own higher ground.

—Jeff Goodell

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to  deny the fact of death….  

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember… if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.

—Leo Tolstoy

Whoever says salvation exists is a slave, because he keeps weighing each of his words and deeds at every moment. ‘Will I be saved or damned?’ he tremblingly asks.… Salvation means deliverance from all saviours … now you understand who is the perfect Saviour.… It is the Saviour who shall deliver mankind from salvation.

—Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twin-kling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. – One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illus-trated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. 

—Nietzsche (1873)

When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it. . . . There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. . . . For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.

—ÉMILE DURKHEIM, On Suicide

Hard as it may be for a state so framed to be shaken, yet, since all that comes into being must decay, even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but will suffer dissolution. 

—PLATO, The Republic 

Sweeney Todd (2007) Epiphany (With Lirycs)

“I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.” 

—F. W. Thurston

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

—H.P. Lovecraft Call of Cuthulu 

Television amounts only to a series of cruel plays about people with purpose; she even envies characters who are killed on screen or doomed to die during a commercial. If faced with her own imminent death, she could at least release the relentless anxiety of futility. A suicide though, even one portrayed ineptly on a daytime drama, fills her with vexation, makes her feel alien to a species that can produce such options. Rejecting the contradiction, afraid of pursuing the logic, she has never pondered the line that runs between death and death at one’s own hands. It is a non-question, irrelevant. It is one of those tricks of reasoning that can only be seen on an abstract level, for brought to terms with bread and water, it comes undone.

—John O'Brien, Leaving Las Vegas

Vita nostra brevis est 

Brevi finietur. 

Venit mors velociter 

Rapit nos atrociter 

Nemini parcetur. 

Our life is brief Soon it will end. 

Death comes quickly 

Snatches us cruelly 

To nobody shall it be spared. 

—De Brevitate Vitae (Gaudeamus igitur)

Within the hierarchy of fabrications that compose our lives—families, countries, gods—the self incontestably ranks highest. Just below the self is the family, which has proven itself more durable than national or ethnic affiliations, with these in turn outranking god-figures for their staying power. So any progress toward the salvation of humankind will probably begin from the bottom—when our gods have been devalued to the status of refrigerator magnets or lawn ornaments. Following the death rattle of deities, it would appear that nations or ethnic communities are next in line for the boneyard. Only after fealty to countries, gods, and families has been shucked off can we even think about coming to grips with the least endangered of fabrications—the self. However, this hierarchy may change in time as science makes inroads regarding the question of selfhood, which, if the findings are negative, could reverse the progression, with the extinction of the self foretelling that of families, national and ethnic affiliations, and gods. After all, the quintessential sequence by which we free ourselves from our selves and our institutions is still that depicted in the Buddha legend. Born a prince, so the story goes, the nascent Enlightened One, Siddhartha Gautama, embarked on a quest to neutralize his ego by first leaving behind his family, gods, and sociopolitical station—all  in one stroke.

—Thomas Ligotti

Who knows whether, when a comet shall approach this globe to destroy it, as it often has been and will be destroyed, men will not tear rocks from their foundations by means of steam, and hurl mountains, as the giants are said to have done, against the flaming mass?—and then we shall have traditions of Titans again, and of wars with Heaven. 

—Lord Byron

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 

Schopenhauer

"[L]ife presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment, but as a task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares, constant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme exertion of all the powers of body and mind. Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on account of his own; but many thousands fall as a sacrifice for it. Now senseless delusions, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with each other; then the sweat and the blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of  individuals, or to expiate their faults. In peace industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for some thing that is of no value. But when we consider it more closely, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or motive."

—Arthur schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translation by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp

Emerson

“We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

An insomniacs dreams

My sleep, when it comes, is tormented—filled with demons—

I could handle my grandmother eating out of an ashtray and my father screaming obscenities as he drove a rocket propelled flamingo into my childhood home. But my dreams are too real, no longer fun flights of fancy,  they're full of uncomfortable moments—eating beans with my roommate who keeps berating me for not doing the dishes, and wants to cut my hair or else sad long attempts at writing the great American novel that just dissolves in my hands as soon as it starts to get good...boring shit that for whatever reason embeds itself into my mind like a freeloading tick, so I have to question myself, dreams have taken up valuable space, like, I remember this happening, right now, yes, Bob you are going to call me while I'm eating chips and tell me my teeth are going to fall out but its ok because the whales are dying—and for some reason I can't stop remembering you mentioning the whales and the teeth. Why am I using up valuable brain harddrive space with crazy nonsense that my brain came up with due to some random firing of synaptic bio-neuro-chemical-whatevers that occured while I was in a state of comotose-insanity called sleep?

A tale told by an idiot

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

—By William Shakespeare (from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)

A Toad

Il en est pour qui la vie est chose simple,
chose facile et de tous les jours;
on fait sa correspondance, on « fait l’amour »,
on fait, avant tout, « ses affaires »
et puis on recommence encore le lendemain
avec seulement la même règle que la veille
et qui est d’éviter les grandes joies barbares
de même que les grandes douleurs
comme un crapaud contourne une pierre sur son chemin.

There are those for whom life is a simple thing,
an easy thing, an everyday thing:
you write your letters, you “make love”,
you do, first of all, “your business”,
and then you start again tomorrow
with just the same rule as yesterday,
which is to avoid great savage joys
as well as great sorrows
like a toad avoids a pebble in its path.

_{Guy-Charles Cros (1912). Les fêtes quotidiennes, pp. 9–10}

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

 —VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory: A Memoir

However much we’d prefer it otherwise, to achieve “I think, therefore I am” is to run headlong into the rejoinder “I am, therefore I will die.”

The Morbid Man

Isolation, mental strain, emotional exertions, visionary infatuations, well-executed fevers, repudiations of well-being: only a few of the many exercises practiced by that specimen we shall call the “morbid man.” And our subject of supernatural horror is a vital part of his program. Retreating from a world of heath and sanity, or at least one that daily invests in such commodities, the morbid man seeks the shadows behind the scenes of life. He backs himself into a corner alive with cool drafts and fragrant with centuries of must. It is in that corner that he builds a world of ruins out of the battered stones of his  imagination, a rancid world rife with things smelling of the crypt. But this world is not all a romantic sanctum for the dark in spirit. So let us condemn it for a moment, this deep-end of dejection. Although there is no name for what might be called the morbid man’s “sin,” it still seems in violation of some deeply ingrained morality. The morbid man does not appear to be doing himself or others any good. And while we all know that melancholic moping and lugubrious ruminating are quite palatable as side-dishes of existence, he has turned them into a house specialty! Ultimately, however, he may meet this charge of wrongdoing with a simple “What of it?” Now, such a response assumes morbidity to be a certain class of vice, one to be pursued without apology, and one whose advantages and disadvantages must be enjoyed or endured  outside the law . But as a sower of vice, if only in his own soul, the morbid man incurs the following censure: that he is a symptom or a cause of decay within both individual and collective spheres of being. And decay, like every other process of becoming, hurts everybody. “Good!” shouts the morbid man. “Not good!” counters the crowd. Both positions betray dubious origins: one in resentment, the other in fear. And when the moral debate on this issue eventually reaches an impasse or becomes too tangled for truth, then psychological polemics can begin. Later on we will find other angles from which this problem may be attacked, enough to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives. Meanwhile, the morbid man keeps putting his  time on earth  to no good use, until in the end—amidst mad winds, wan moonlight, and pasty specters—he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.

—Professor Nobody