Beau

“The real question I am asking here is the one Marcuse asked in the sixties. How does a way of life break down? How does it break down. And Marcuse doesn’t give the pat Marxist answer, which means economically, and we ought to be glad that that pat Marxist answer is false because if a society could be driven to ruin by debt, you know, the way a lot of people said the Russians – the Soviet Union – fell because it was broke. Let’s hope that’s not true [laughs] since we are broke, let’s hope that’s false. As a generalisation, we had better hope it is false.

How do they break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.”
― Rick Roderick, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

“The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“Años atrás ya lo había intuido, pero sólo ahora lo confirmo: cuando uno desea a una mujer, sólo conoce la mitad del propio deseo. El deseo completo sobreviene en el instante en que se tiene conciencia de que también la mujer lo desea a uno. Entonces sí la presión se vuelve insoportable.”
― Mario Benedetti, Gracias por el fuego

“Look at your mind. Be curious. Welcome groundlessness. Lighten up and relax. Offer chaos a cup of tea. Let go of ‘us and them.’ Don’t turn away. Everything you do and think affects everyone else on the planet. Let the pain of the world touch you and cause your compassion to blossom. And never give up on yourself.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times