Joshua

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“The cunning waste their pains;
The wise men vex their brains;
But the simpleton, who seeks no gains,
With belly full, he wanders free
As drifting boat upon the sea.”
― Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days

“Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“THE VOID hates creation. if you ever hear call of the lonesome train with sad days ahead do not forget this direct response at your fingertips: CREATE SOMETHING. anything. even if no buds ever know. this is powerful rebuke against the vast nothing and pushes back to say I AM HERE”
― Chuck Tingle