Chris Parker

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“have spoken to you before about the ocean of consciousness. About its sublime immensity, about how terrifying it is to behold. It is the eyes, laden with an entire world trapped in a moment of perspective, which express the terrifying consciousness of the other. To suffer the infernal gaze of the other is to witness another consciousness recognizing you. Not the frozen eyes of the dead or the sheathed daggers of the dreaming, but the waking, attentive other. It is to have this terrific alien consciousness confront you and elude you with its mysteries; with its secret history, which it will not reveal to you; with its endlessness, which you shall never capture. Conversely, when you gaze into the mirror and look yourself in the eyes, you see nothing but a blank appearance. You feel nothing but the pacific and neutral zero of totality. You do not feel the same apprehension, the same sense of mystery or unpredictability. Everything behind those familiar eyes is already clarified. Your reflected gaze is, in fact, mute, because it signifies nothing except the very act constituting it. Yet the closest you will come to seeing the other— not merely her corpse, but her and her existence —is by looking her in the eyes. When you return her gaze, you are struck by the possibility of her history, of her present being like an immortal’s never-finished painting covered in centuries of layers. What would otherwise be just an animated object in the world, no different to the wind or an earthquake, instead presents itself, like you as you know yourself, as an embodied soul. An immaterial subject, somehow present in the flesh. And what is love except the ceaseless attempt at capturing this subjectivity of the other without simultaneously compromising her autonomy? This autonomy, which she requires in order to return your love and therefore complete it. It envelops the patience of long marriage; the unity of welded lives, tastes, preferences, and ambitions. I looked at Sophia; I looked in her eyes. I looked at her and I loved her; I looked at her and I loved; I tried to look at her and I tried to love her.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“You think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a man, in the second you’re no better than a bird. Truth won’t escape you, but life can be cramped. There have been examples. And what are we doing now? In science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aims, liberalism, judgment, experience and everything, everything, everything, we are still in the preparatory class at school. We prefer to live on other people’s ideas, it’s what we are used to!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment