By Jay Cougar (via bookspaperscissors)
A happy death. It can be done. If you’re William Blake and totally crazy.
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| — | By Maurice Sendak (via yoctoontologist) |
Don’t ever look for morals after you find out riddles.
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| — | From Turning by Lynda Sexson, published in Birthday Stories; an anthology by Haruki Murakami |
Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and therefore, etc, etc. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do so; and that is an important point.
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| — | From Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the sub-strata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped anyone expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.
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From Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller ***I found this quote pasted in my own personal journals under the date Friday 10/12/10 and the title (no doubt taken from the Frank Stanford poem) “allegory of love”. |
God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time .
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| — | From Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman |
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There’s lots of good fish in the sea … maybe … but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are lucky to find very few good fish in the sea.
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| — | From Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (via poetryisnotorgasmic) |
Wacky Lists, #1: Writers Who Committed Suicide
1) Jean-Pierre Duprey: was a French poet and a sculptor. He committed suicide by hanging himself at the age of 29. Three days before his death, he told a friend: “I am allergic to this planet”.
2) John Berryman: was an American poet who suffered from alcoholism throughout his life and killed himself by jumping off a bridge at the age of 57.
3) Ernest Hemingway: was an American author and journalist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He shot himself in the head when he was 61.
4) Sarah Kane: was an English playwright. At the age of 28, and two days after overdosing on prescription drugs, she hung herself by her shoelaces in a bathroom in a hospital.
5) Anne Sexton: was an American poet who suffered from severe mental illness most of her life. She killed herself through starting the engine of her car and locking the garage door; hence dying of carbon monoxide poisoning aged 45.
6) Sylvia Plath: was an American poet, novelist and short story writer who suffered from mental illness throughout most of her life. She killed herself by sticking her head in the oven and hence died of carbon monoxide poisoning, aged 30.
7) David Foster Wallace: was an American novelist and essayist. He suffered from severe depression and hung himself when his medication ceased to work at the age of 46.
8) May Ayim: was an Afro-German poet and activist. She killed herself by jumping from the thirteenth floor of a building at the age of 36.
9) Hunter S. Thompson: was an American author and journalist. He shot himself in the head at the age of 67. His suicide note, which he left for his wife, read: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”
10) Richard Brautigan: was an American poet, short story writer and novelist. He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression. When he was 48, he shot himself in the head and his body was found more than a month later. His suicide note read: “Messy, isn’t it?”
11) Virginia Woolf: was an English author, essayist and short story writer. She killed herself by filling her pockets with rocks then jumping into the sea and thus drowning at the age of 59. Her last note to her husband read: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness…”
12) Frank Stanford: was an American poet. He ended his life by shooting himself in the heart three times at the age of 29.
13) Vladimir Mayakovsky: was a Russian poet and playwright. At the age of 36, he shot himself in the heart, leaving behind an unfinished poem as a suicide note:
And so they say-
“the incident dissolved”
the love boat smashed up
on the dreary routine.
I’m through with life
and [we] should absolve
from mutual hurts, afflictions and spleen.
14) Ingrid Jonker: was a South African poet. At the age of 32, she drowned herself. Her father’s response to the discovery of her corpse was: “They can throw her back into the sea for all I care”.
A rare video of Anais Nin talking about her life and diaries. I am stunned by how beautiful she is even though she was well into her sixties if not seventies in the video. I am also very fascinated by the semantics of the relationship between her and Henry Miller.
Interesting and made me smile, chuckle, grin, smirk, move my lips in a stretchy way that implies favoritism…etc. (via vintageanchor)
