Adrian Budz

“The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“Consolation

Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.”
― Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

“What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm in which pigs are half-blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, torture and suffering of millions we know about, but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect of having to watch a snuff movie portraying what goes on thousands of times a day around the world: brutal acts of torture, the picking out of eyes, the crushing of testicles -the list cannot bear recounting. Would the watcher be able to continue going on as usual? Yes, but only if he or she were able somehow to forget -in an act which suspended symbolic efficiency -what had been witnessed. This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowal: "I know it, but I don't want to know that I know, so I don't know." I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don't know it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections