Schlemihl Quotes

“One morning Profane woke up early, couldn't get back to sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn't turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slipped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and another fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as he was tying it. All the rests of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn't that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemihl, he'd known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“So the secret of philosophy may not be to know oneself, nor to know where one is going, but rather to go where the other is going; not to dream oneself, but rather to dream what others dream; not to believe oneself, but rather to believe in those who do believe: to give priority to all determinants from elsewhere. Whether they are legible or not, decipherable or not, is of no consequence - the main thing is to embrace the foreign form of any event, any object, any fortuitous being, because in any case you will never know who you are. Today, when people have lost their shadows, it is of the utmost importance to be followed by someone; today, when everyone is losing their own tracks, it is of the utmost urgency that someone be on your tracks: even if he wipes them out and makes you disappear as a result, at least your disappearance will have occurred in a collusive mode; at least a symbolic form of obligation, an enigmatic form of conjunction and disjunction, will have been brought into play.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena