S. Mehdi

“Anyone who's never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity. For twelve months, I watched my father dying - when I was ten years old.”
― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“Who needs me?” is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between risk and reward. It radiates indifference in the organization of absence and trust, where there is no reason to be needed. And it does so through reengineering of institutions in which people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others. It could be said that capitalism was always thus. But not in the same way. The indifference of the old class-bound capitalism was starkly material; the indifference which radiates out of flexible capitalism is more personal because the system itself is less starkly etched, less legible in form.”
― Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

“Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.”
― Samuel Johnson, Essays From the Rambler and the Idler: With Passages From the Lives of the Poets Prayer and Meditations and Other Writings

“A little darkness, in itself, at the time, is nothing. You think no more about it and you go on. But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies