Luke

“What was this world? In what petrified and strange insanity was I given to live? Would I survive long enough to find the answer? To find the exit? Would I ever understand, from the core of my loneliness, this otherworldly apparatus that was my life? And suddenly, in the concrete, empty teachers’ lounge—with its large table covered with red cloth, with its cabinet for the registers, with its mold-stained paintings—I was enveloped in a fear that I had never felt before, even in my most terrifying dreams; not of death, not of suffering, not of terrible diseases, not of the sun going dark, but fear at the thought that I will never understand, that my life was not long enough and my mind not good enough to understand. That I had been given many signs and I didn’t know how to read them. That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hand, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it will flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“Ever since I found, at age sixteen, the treatise in the agricultural engineer’s house, I hadn’t stopped wondering what it would have been like to be born as a mite or a louse, or one of the billions of polyps on coral reefs. I would have lived without knowing that I lived, my life would have been a moment of obscure agitation, with pains and pleasures and contacts and alarms and urges, far from thought and far from consciousness, in some abject hole, in a blind dot, in total oblivion. “But that is what I am, it is,” I suddenly found myself saying out loud. This is what we all are, blind mites stumbling along our piece of dust in an unknown, irrational infinity, in the horrible dead end of this world. We think we have access to the logical-mathematical structure of the world, but we continue to live without self-consciousness and without understanding, digging tunnels through the skin of God, causing him nothing but fits and irritation.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism — it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components — the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals.’ The world has dropped its petals.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“God’s kingdom was the moment.
The trees, the forest, the sea, the lily, the bird, all existed in the moment. To them, there was no such thing as future or past. Nor any fear or terror.
That was the first turning point. The second came when I read what followed. What happens to the bird does not concern it.
It was the most radical thought I had ever known. It would free me from all pain, all suffering. What happens to me does not concern me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, The Morning Star