Helisa Taban

“وقتی آدم یک نفر را دوست داشته باشد بیش‌تر تنهاست. چون نمی‌تواند به هیچ کس جز به همان آدم بگوید که چه احساسی دارد. و اگر آن آدم کسی باشد که تو را به سکوت تشویق می‌کند، تنهایی تو کامل می‌شود!”
― عباس معروفی, سمفونی مردگان

“از آن زمان که آرزو چو نقشي از سراب شد
تمام جستجوي دل سوال بي جواب شد
نرفته کام تشنه اي به جستجوي چشمه ها
خطوط نقش زندگي چو نقشه اي بر آب شد
چه سينه سوز آه ها که خفته بر لبان ما
هزار گفتني به لب اسير پيچ و تاب شد
نه شور عارفانه اي نه شوق شاعرانه اي
قرار عاشقانه هم شتاب در شتاب شد
نه فرصت شکايتي نه قصه و روايتي
تمام جلوه هاي جان چو آرزو به خواب شد
نگاه منتظر به در نشست و عمر شد به سر
نيامده به خود دگر که دوره شباب شد”
― مهين عميد

“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death