Jonfaith

“The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.”
― Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither

“The biggest and, outwardly, most trustful banker in history is God, the administrator delegated to eternity. And his credit institute is Paradise. Billions of faithfuls, for centuries, have invested in the hope of God, expecting redemption in eternal life. And since the celestial agency is going bankrupt, nothing is left of its capital, on which the hopes of six billion faithful consumers rely. Capitalism is a project of universal anthropology. Humans primarily are beings who desire. Not in an hedonistic, but in a materialistic sense: in the modern period, Westerners have looked for felicity through the possession of objects and the consumption of commodities.”
― Peter Sloterdijk

“I shall have spent my life in railway stations
Nearly departing
For catastrophes,
All for love
And my heart haloed with the madness of love.
Nothing is quite so beautiful as the trains I’ve missed …”
― Jules Laforgue, Last Verses

“In essence, France no longer existed. It existed only in the hatred of the French for one another.”
― Raymond Aron